This biography explores the life of a groundbreaking Welsh writer whose work explores themes both personal and political.

Duncan Bush (1946–2017) was an ambitious, challenging, and self-styled “working class” writer from Cardiff who spent periods living in France and Luxembourg. Following early academic success, he devoted himself to his own prose and poetry and published several volumes of writings that include Aquarium (1984), The Genre of Silence (1987), and The Flying Trapeze (2012). In both personal and political contexts, Bush’s novel Glass Shot (1991) elaborated on feelings arising from the 1984–5 miners’ strike, and his works more broadly express an interest in cinema and the nuanced influence the USA had on his life. The present volume also contains material by Bush not previously available in the public domain, including his largely uncollected translations from French and Italian poetry.