ABSTRACT
Caradog Prichard’s novel Un Nos Ola Leuad (One Moonlit Night), was quickly recognised as a landmark in modern Welsh literature when it was published in 1961, and it remains one of the most famous and widely read Welsh-language novels – it has been a set text in schools and universities in Wales for years, and has been translated into many languages. It was turned into a Welsh-language film in 1991. Its dark themes (the effect on a young boy of his mother’s mental illness, and the gradual descent into chaos that this entails), its weirdly mythological moments and its semi-‘stream of consciousness’ narrative style give the novel a unique character – a strangely dislocated autobiographical picture of village life in a slate-quarrying community in North Wales during the First World War. Prichard was born in Bethesda in 1904 and died in 1980, having spent much of his life in London, working primarily as a journalist. His early work as a poet won him the Crown at the National Eisteddfod three years running (1927 to 1929), and he won the Chair in 1962.
