Dannie Abse was born into what was to become Wales’s best-known Jewish family. His older brothers would also go on to distinguish themselves in their chosen fields: Wilfred as a psychologist and Leo both as a lawyer and Labour MP whose Private Members Bill made homosexuality legal in England and Wales.

Leo, he later recalled, would bring political magazines home including "poems that were not about celandines, and not about skylarks, but about the war in Spain, and as a result I felt that I wanted to write political poems".

Dannie’s first volume of poetry After Every Green Thing was published in 1948 while he was still a medical student. He went on to become a chest specialist, working for many years in London before retiring to South Wales to concentrate on his writing.

In A Poet in the Family he began what was to become a series of autobiographical volumes recalling his childhood in Wales and life beyond. . He followed it up with There Was A Young Man from Cardiff, A Strong Dose of Myself and Goodbye, Twentieth Century.

He has also published twelve volumes of poetry, two plays and two novels including Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve, perhaps the best-known of all his prolific output.

Personal experience informs all his works and his medical experience has given him a highly unusual perspective for a poet. The doctor’s unique insight into death, for example, is vividly described in Carnal Knowledge.

In the poem he compares his own living hand with that of a cadaver he dissected as a student, recognising finally after many years that it too will one day become as lifeless as that of the corpse- which in his youth he felt could never have belonged to somebody once shockingly alive.

Politics remains another recurrent theme- especially in relation to his Jewishness and the nightmare of the holocaust. "Auschwitz", he has said, "made me more of a Jew than Moses ever did".