The Rhys Davies Trust was set up in 1990. It owes its existence to the extraordinary generosity of Lewis Davies, the writer's brother. No conditions were attached to the gift and, though the Trustees are much concerned to keep green the name and literary reputation of Rhys Davies, their broad aims to stimulate activity and interest in Welsh writing in English can be satisfied by a variety of outcomes. The Trust enjoys an annual income from investments that, in its first five years or so, has funded an annual lecture, grants for students attending writing courses, predictably (in view of Rhys Davies's contribution to the genre) short story competitions, and in 1993 a pair of European travel bursaries, one of which was won by Gwyneth Lewis. So it was I met her, on the occasion of the formal presentation of the bursaries at Waterstone's in Cardiff. That was a low-key event, but since then, and particularly with the publication of Parables and Faxes, she has emerged as the most exciting 'new' poet this side of the border. Gwyneth Lewis was born in Cardiff and educated at Cambridge, at Harvard and Columbia University in the USA, and at Oxford where she did research on literary forgeries. She worked as a journalist in the United States and on the Philippine Islands before returning to Wales; she is now a television producer. While at Columbia, she attended a seminar on translations at which she met a Hungarian translator, Árpád Göncz, who had ...