Dannie Abse author page

Dannie Abse biography

Dannie Abse was a Welsh poet, physician, playwright, essayist and novelist. He was born in Cardiff in 1923 and died in 2014.

He studied medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine and later at Westminster Hospital Medical School and King’s College, London. He practised for more than thirty years in a chest clinic in London.

His first poetry collection, After Every Green Thing, was published in 1949. Over his lifetime he published numerous volumes of poetry, plays, essays and novels.

He served as President of the Poetry Society from 1978 to 1992. Abse was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2012 for services to literature.

His memoir The Presence, which reflects on the year following his wife’s death, won the Wales Book of the Year Award in 2008.