File A7/6. - Landscapes : : Ynys Môn : five songs for tenor and piano, [op. 87],

Alun Hoddinott, the eminent Welsh composer and teacher, was born at Bargoed, 11 August 1929. He received his secondary education at Gowerton Grammar School where, in 1946, he won a scholarship to study at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff. He graduated (BMus) in 1949 and during this period he also studied composition with the Australian composer and pianist, Arthur Benjamin, in London.

Lecturing posts in Cardiff - at the Welsh College of Music and Drama, 1951-1959, and the University College, 1959-1965, led to a readership at the University of Wales. He gained a DMus in 1960. In 1967 he was appointed Professor of Music and Head of Department at Cardiff, retiring in 1987 in order to devote himself to composition.

Also in 1967 he co-founded the Cardiff Festival of Twentieth Century Music with the pianist John Ogdon, and was its artistic director until 1989.

In April 1953 he married Rhiannon Huws. They had studied together at Cardiff and she became central to every aspect of his life. She often translated and prepared texts to set to music. Their son, Huw Ceri, was born in 1957.

Alun Hoddinott became established early in his career as being one of the leading British composers of his generation. He achieved his first national success in 1954 when his Clarinet Concerto, op. 3, was given its first public performance at the Cheltenham Festival by Gervase de Peyer and the Hallé Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli. This brought him a national profile which was followed by a string of commissions by distinguished singers and instrumentalists that continued throughout his life. A prolific composer, his vast and versatile catalogue comprises nearly 300 individual works, including six operas, ten symphonies and over twenty concertos.

He was presented with several honorary awards, professional accolades and prestigious prizes in recognition of his achievements. He was appointed CBE in 1983. In 2009 the BBC National Orchestra of Wales's new home at the Wales Millennium Centre was named the BBC Hoddinott Hall - Neuadd Hoddinott BBC in his honour.

Alun Hoddinott died 11 March 2008.

Emyr Humphreys (1919-), one of Wales' most significant writers and cultural activists, was born in Prestatyn and brought up in Trelawnyd, both Flintshire. He was educated at UCW, Aberystwyth, where he studied history, learnt Welsh, and where he became a Welsh nationalist. He had registered as a conscientious objector in 1939, and was sent to work in Pembrokeshire during the Second World War. Later in 1944 he was sent as a war relief worker to the Middle East and then to Italy until 1946, where he was an officer with the Save the Children Fund. He married in 1946, the daughter of a Congregational minister. He became a teacher, and taught at Wimbledon Technical College until 1951, and then at Pwllheli Grammar School. He worked for the BBC as Drama Producer from 1955 until 1965, when he became a lecturer in drama at the University College of North Wales, Bangor. In 1972, he left to become a full-time writer. He has won numerous prizes, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1952 for his novel Hear and Forgive, and The Hawthornden Prize in 1958 for A Toy Epic, and has published articles in Planet and the Welsh Internationalist. He has published over twenty novels, including The Little Kingdom (1946), The Voice of a Stranger (1949), A Toy Epic (1958), The Anchor Tree (1980), A Change of Heart (1951), Hear and Forgive (1952), A Man's Estate (1955), The Italian Wife (1957), Outside the House of Baal (1965), National Winner (1971), Flesh and Blood (1974), The Best of Friends (1978), Salt of the Earth (1985), An Absolute Hero (1986), Open Secrets (1988), Bonds of Attachment (1991), The Gift (1973), Jones (1984), Unconditional Surrender (1996), The Gift of a Daughter (1998), Ghosts and Strangers (2001), Old People are a Problem (2003), and The Shop; a collection of short stories, Natives (1968), and four volumes of verse, Ancestor Worship (1970), Landscapes (1976), The Kingdom of Brân (1979), Pwyll a Rhiannon (1980). His book Emyr Humphreys: Conversation and Reflections (2004), bring his uncollected writings together.