Listening to Cerys Matthews, BBC radio broadcaster, musician and author, read from Under Milk Wood is thrilling, enlivening and soothing all at the same time. Her eyes sparkle with mischief and the sheer joy of reading aloud as her silken musical voice with its beautiful Welsh lilt compels Dylan Thomas’ characters to leap off the page.
We’re sitting on a bench in London’s Kew Gardens on a blue-sky December day talking about Cerys’ latest book, a retelling of writer Dylan Thomas’s 1954 ‘play for voices’ – an adaptation for younger readers illustrated in superb detail by artist Kate Evans. We’d been walking and recording for the magazine’s Plodcast, and after chatting about the book and her deep love of the countryside, I was bursting to ask the former singer of 1990s band Catatonia to read aloud these words she knows so intimately. Her lyrical tones transported me to
