Dannie Abse

1923–2014

Welsh poet and physician whose writing drew on his Jewish upbringing in Cardiff and his medical career. He studied medicine at Cardiff, King’s College London and Westminster Hospital, and worked for more than thirty years at a London chest clinic. His prose includes Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve (1954), an autobiographical novel of his Cardiff boyhood. The Presence, a memoir following his wife’s death, won the 2008 Wales Book of the Year. He died in London in 2014. The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas, his fifth novel, was longlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize.

Timeline of Dannie Abse’s life

Works

• The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas (2002)

Prizes

• The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas — The Booker Prize 2002: Longlist