File NLW MS 23848D - Rhys Davies correspondence

Anna Kavan (1901-1968) was a writer of short stories, essays and novels and a literary critic; she was also a painter and an interior designer.
She was born Helen Emily Woods in Cannes on 10 April 1901 of English parents and spent her childhood in Europe, California and England, and took the name of Anna Kavan, her own fictional alter ego about 1940. She began writing while living with her first husband Donald Ferguson in Burma. Her literary works have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish and Japanese. Rhys Davies 'who knew her longer and possibly better than anyone', according to her biographer D. A. Callard, was asked to write her biography by her literary agent David Higham. He refused saying that even after thirty years of friendship he did not know enough. Rhys Davies wrote introductions to her books which were published posthumously and his last published novel, Honeysuckle girl (London, 1975) examines the breakdown of her marriage with Stuart Edmonson. Raymond Marriott and Rhys Davies became her literary executors and equally inherited her estate after her death in December 1968.

Keidrych Rhys, literary journalist, editor and poet, was born William Ronald Rees Jones in Bethlehem, Carmarthenshire. In 1937 he founded the pioneering and highly influential magazine Wales, which invited contributions from an array of prominent writers such as Alun Lewis, Saunders Lewis, Dylan Thomas and Robert Graves and which effectively created the concept of Anglo-Welsh literature. Rhys also published a poetic anthology of his own entitled The Van Pool (London, 1942).