Menna Gallie (Q62549)

Menna Gallie, novelist, was born in 1920 in the mining village of Ystradgynlais in the Swansea Valley, and was brought up there and later in Creunant. Both parents were Welsh speakers; her father a North-Walian craftsman, and her mother a local woman. She graduated in 1940 in English at Swansea University. In the same year she married a Scotsman named Bryce Gallie, who was a philosophy lecturer at the same University. Following the end of the war in which Bryce Gallie had served, they moved to Keele following Bryce Gallie's appointment on the teaching staff of Keele University. Between 1954 and around 1967, they lived in Northern Ireland. During this period they also lived in America for a year, probably in 1962. The couple lived in Cambridge from around 1967 until 1978 before finally moving back to Wales to Newport, Pembrokeshire. Menna Gallie's first novel Strike for a Kingdom was published in 1959 and was based in industrial South Wales. Man's Desiring followed in 1960 and The Small Mine in 1962. Six years passed before her next novel Travels With a Duchess, 1969, followed by You're Welcome to Ulster, 1970. Her translation of Caradog Prichard's novel Un Nos Ola Leuad was published under the title Full Moon in 1973, and she also began translating his autobiography Afal Drwg Adda (Denbigh, 1973), and then wrote a leaflet on Pembrokeshire, Little England's Other Half (1974). Later, she published another novel, In These Promiscuous Parts in 1986. She died in 1990 aged 70.