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Tony Curtis was born in Carmarthen in 1946 and grew up there and in Pembrokeshire, where his grandmother’s family had lived for hundreds of years. He read English at Swansea University, did an MFA in Goddard College, Vermont and spent forty years in education, from 1969 to 2009, as a school teacher then a college lecturer and as Wales’s first Professor of Poetry at the University of Glamorgan, where he developed and directed the M. Phil in Writing. He has written and edited over forty books, most recently his first novel Darkness in the City of Light and an anthology of poems for the Ty Hafan children’s charity – Where the Birds Sing our Names. He was awarded a Gregory Award in 1972; he won the National Poetry Competition in 1983. In 1993, he won the Dylan Thomas Award for Spoken Poetry, judged by Dannie Abse and Dylan’s daughter Aeronwy. He had a Cholmondeley Award in 1998. He was awarded a D.Litt. in 2004. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.