A beautiful gift for Chirstmas, this superb selection of writing by celebrated Welsh poet Dylan Thomas opens with his enchanting story A Child’s Christmas in Wales. This classic tale recalls magical days full of family, snowy countryside and the magic of Christmas, inspired by the author’s childhood in Wales.Thomas also revisits his youth in his series of stories Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, brilliantly evoking his life through boyhood and adolescence to emerge as a young man in a series of vivid, uncompromising stories peopled with finely drawn characters.Then come the poems, carefully chosen and featuring such greats as ‘And death shall have no dominion’, ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘Do not go gently into that good night’.Dylan Thomas was a twentieth-century bard, and was able to get to the root of people’s lives and to express human emotions with intense skill and originality. He is remembered for his love of words and a startling inventiveness which has yet to be beaten.A Child's Christmas in Wales & Other Stories and Poems is part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, pocket-sized classics bound in real cloth with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.

Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, on 27 October 1914. He began writing as a young teenager, filling exercise books with poems. He left school at sixteen to work as reporter for a local newspaper before devoting himself to writing, spending time in Swansea, rural Wales and London. His first poetry collection, 18 Poems, was published when he was only twenty.In 1937 he moved to London, where he met Caitlin Macnamara, a dancer. They had three children together but their marriage was famously turbulent, exacerbated by their precarious financial situation and Thomas’s addictions.A significant part of his working life was spent in America and it was there that an incomplete version of ‘Under Milk Wood’, a ‘play for voices’, was first performed in New York in 1953.Celebrated and renowned for his poetry as well as for his rackety lifestyle, Dylan Thomas died in New York at the age of only thirty-nine. He was buried in Laugharne in rural Wales, a place he loved.