Kate Roberts

Introduction to Kate Roberts

This is an introduction to the life and work of Kate Roberts, the most important woman writer ever to have emerged from Wales. It offers a comprehensive account of her life, from her birth into a life of poverty and hardship in the slate-quarrying region of Snowdonia to her death almost a hundred years later in Denbigh; in between, she had attended University, at a time when very few Welsh women did, worked as an impassioned and inspirational teacher in the south Wales valleys, run a major printing press and published the main Welsh national newspaper, Y Faner, helped to found Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, campaigned tirelessly for the Welsh language, challenged gender stereotypes and restrictions in traditional patriarchal Wales, and produced a body of literary work in the Welsh language which makes her rank alongside Saunders Lewis as the greatest Welsh writer of the twentieth century.