Raymond Williams study is Archbishop of Canterbury's "biography of the year"

Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has selected a Swansea researcher's study of Raymond Williams as his biography of the year.

Professor Dai Smith holds the Raymond Williams Chair in Cultural History at Swansea University's Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales (CREW), which is based in the School of Arts. He published Raymond Williams: A Warrior's Tale in May 2008.

Following excellent reviews, he now joins authors Barack Obama, Martin Amis and Stefan Zweig on the 2008 Times Literary Supplement (TLS) Books of the Year list.

Writing in the TLS on Wednesday 26 November, The Archbishop of Canterbury describes Professor Smith's biography as "a completely engaged, imaginatively dense study of someone who was with good reason a sort of moral touchstone for one important strand in the British Left".

Raymond Williams is widely held to be one of the one of the most influential socialist writers and thinkers in post-war Britain. He introduced radical new approaches to the theory and practice of culture as a social dynamic and is regarded as one of the last, great male intellectual figures of the 20th Century.

He is also seen as Wales' major intellectual figure of the 20th Century. By the end of the 1950s he had broken down the academic barriers between different forms of study, such as literary criticism and sociology.

For more see http://www.swansea.ac.uk/news_centre/LatestNews/Headline,29509,en.php