List Of Writers

WILLIAMS, MICHAEL ARNOLD

Michael was born in Newport, Monmouthshire in 1936, and educated at schools in Caerleon and Pontypool, going from there to the University of London, (BSc, MSc, PhD, with military service sandwiched between BSc and MSc). All three degrees were in different scientific disciplines. He was elected FIBiol, and is a Chartered Biologist.

From 1961 to 1994, first at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School of London, Hammersmith, and later at Sheffield University, he published a very large number of scientific articles, reviews and proceedings, and several well–known technical books, the latter remaining in print over a twenty year period. He has travelled and taught very widely, including in France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Australasia, Japan, Canada and the USA, and several countries behind the Iron Curtain.

From 1989 Michael took up writing appreciations and obituaries of scientific colleagues to be published in the gazette pages of national daily newspapers, and in various relevant magazines. In 1992 he lead two small teams writing manuals on teaching methods in Higher Education, for the British and Commonwealth Universities. Latterly, he was Tutor on a large graduate programme, and taught many British and overseas graduate students of a variety of disciplines, to write.

Michael commenced writing poetry in 1992 and was an early visitor to Ty Newydd, a centre he has continued to attend.  In 1996 he published a book on the nature of local histories, for Addison Wesley Longman (now Pearson Education). This book is entitled Researching Local History, The Human Journey, is well known to students on Open University Degree courses, and draws many of its exemplars from Monmouthshire. It also discusses and describes the use of Welsh surname patterns to study Welsh migration into England, and English settlement in Wales.

His first published poems appeared in 1996, (the year I retired early from Sheffield University), in Poetry Wales and Poetry London in 2002. He obtained an MA in Creative Writing at Bretton Hall College, University of Leeds, in 2000, with Distinction. The major portion of his folio at Bretton Hall comprised thirty–two pieces of poetry based on conversations with veterans and widows of veterans of the Great War. Research material which he collected in south Monmouthshire in the 1980s. Seven of those pieces have subsequently appeared in print as a poetic sequence. 

Michael is one of the ten poets appearing in the next Seren anthology, Seren Selections, edited by Amy Wack, due to make its appearance in 2005. He returned to live in Monmouthshire in 2004 and in 2006, his work was nominated for the Forward Prize for ’Best Poem’.

Selected Publications:
Researching Local History: The Human Journey (Approaches to Local History) (Longman, 1996)

You can contact Michael through his publishers, Seren on: 01656 663018