Fight and Flight : Essays on Ron Berry

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.

Ron Berry (1920–1977) was born in Blaencwm, a small village in the Rhondda Valleys of Wales. At age fourteen, he left school to follow his father’s career in the mines, and he remained a miner until World War II. Following his military service, he attended college, where he became an avid reader; soon after, he began writing, publishing his first novel, Hunters and Hunted, in 1960. Over the course of the next four decades, Berry would publish five more novels, a collection of stories, and a memoir, all of which shared a concern with the difficult lives of the working class people among whom he had grown up in the Rhondda Valleys.
While Berry was relatively neglected in his lifetime, his work is increasingly being seen as some of the most astute writing from Wales of the twentieth century. This collection, the first sustained critical study of his work, offers a literary, physical, and chronological view of Berry, from his personal life to the literary geographies and communities in which he was situated to his creative legacy.