Sally Roberts Jones

Fellow at Swansea University, 1999-2001 Associate Fellow, 2001/02 Project Fellow, 2002-04 Fellow at Swansea University, 2004-09

Sally Roberts Jones is poet, biographer, critic, historian and bibliographer.

She was born in north-east London in 1935, and read history at the University College of North Wales, Bangor. After working as a librarian in Greater London in the Sixties, she moved to South Wales in 1967. She was a founder member of the English Language Section of Yr Academi Gymreig (the Welsh Academy) in 1968, was its Secretary/Treasurer from 1968-75, and Chairman from 1993-97.

In addition to her published work, she has run workshops and courses in schools and for adults, given readings in England, Ireland, Wales and Yugoslavia, and written verse plays and children's stories for radio. She is on the editorial board of Roundyhouse, a poetry magazine based in Swansea, and runs her own small press, Alun Books.

She has also written and lectured on the cultural and industrial history of Wales and contributed to the Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales, the Dictionary of Welsh Biography and the New Dictionary of National Biography. Two particular interests are the development of the Arthurian legend and research into the field of Welsh Writing in English, though she has also written about Essex, where she grew up.

Project Fellowship
Sally Roberts Jones worked on the Afan Valley project in South Wales. Although the Afan Valley in Glamorgan was a thriving industrial community for over a century and a half, the effects of the Beeching Plan, which destroyed the valley's rail network, and the run-down of the mining industry left the valley as one of the most socially deprived areas in Britain. The Afan Valley project, based in local libraries, aimed to help the community find its voice again, by seeking out those with a story to tell and offering whatever encouragement and technical advice they need to help them bring that story to a wider audience.

The first fruits of the project appeared in November 2002, with the publication of Grown-ups Don't Cry, by Barbara May Walters (who was Chair of the Glyncorrwg Women's Miners' Strike Committee in 1984):

Tall mountains
bind the horizon,
search for words.

Publications
Romford in the Nineteenth Century, 1969
Turning Away (poems), 1969
The Forgotten Country (poems), 1977
Elen and the Goblin, and other legends of Afan, 1977
Strangers and Brothers (radio poem), 1977
Books of Welsh Interest: an annotated bibliography, 1977
Allen Raine (Writers of Wales series), 1979
Relative Values (poems), 1985
The History of Port Talbot, 1991
Dic Penderyn: the Man and the Martyr, 1993

Email:

srjones@alunbooks.co.uk