Fight and Flight

Ron Berry is one of the most brilliant and cantankerous of Welsh writers. Radical and earthy, he was a collier, carpenter, navvy, footballer, and unorthodox environmentalist. This volume, the first collection of essays on Berry, is a timely response to his forthcoming centenary.

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Ron Berry [1920-97] is one of the most remarkably astute yet relatively neglected twentieth-century Rhondda writers. An avid walker, birdwatcher, `potcher', sportsman and miner, Berry is the product of a distinctive Rhondda landscape; the formidable peaks of Pen Pych and Cefn Nant y Gwair were to be a continuing source of inspiration for him in his writing. His idiosyncratic viewpoints, of which there are many, are reflected in both his memoir and fiction. As the first sustained critical study of his work, this collection seeks a literal, physical and chronological `zooming-outwards', from the man himself to the personal and literary geographies and communities in which he was posited, to his creative legacy.