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Robert Rhydwenfro Williams (29 August 1916 – 2 August 1997), known professionally as Rhydwen Williams, was a Welsh poet, novelist, Baptist minister, and broadcaster. Writing primarily in his native Welsh, he was noted for modernising traditional Welsh poetic forms by applying them to the industrial landscapes and social realities of the twentieth century, while retaining the strict metres and prosody of the bardic tradition.
A two-time winner of the Crown at the National Eisteddfod of Wales, he was associated with the Cadwgan Circle of writers and intellectuals, and his semi-autobiographical trilogy Cwm Hiraeth is widely regarded as his most important work. Beyond literature, Williams was a prominent advocate of Welsh nationalism, an influential voice in religious and cultural life, and a presenter of Welsh-language television programmes during the early years of broadcasting in Wales.
As a member of the Cadwgan Circle, Guide to Wales, Welsh Literature Go Britannia! website he mixed with fellow members J. Gwyn Griffiths, Pennar Davies and Gareth Alban Davies, and was especially close to J. Kitchener Davies. From this informal group of like-minded intellectuals, Williams developed a style of writing and literal ethic opposed to eisteddfodic tradition. Amongst his heroes were writers Aldous Huxley, W H Auden and George Orwell. Although Williams' poetry was not in keeping with the tradition of the National Eisteddfod, he was still embraced by it. In 1946, at Mountain Ash, he won the Crown competition for the poem Yr Arloeswr (English: The Pioneer) and again in 1964 for Yr Ffynhonnau (English: The Springs).
Leaving Ynyshir in 1946 he travelled Wales, holding pastorates at Resolven and Pont-lliw near Swansea until 1959, before spending a year at Rhyl. Williams later moved from his ministry to accept a post at Granada Television in Manchester, presenting Welsh language programmes, in which his skills as a communicator came to the fore. He wrote television scripts; one about Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the first Welsh-language television play to be broadcast on a foreign network.
Of all Williams' work, his trilogy Cwm Hiraeth is seen by many as his finest achievement;Davies (2008), pg 960. semi-autobiographical, the three books form a prose epic of life in the depression hit Rhondda through the eyes of the author's Uncle Sion, a poet and thinker.
In the 1970s, Williams and his family lived in a council house at Coed yr Haf, in Ystrad Mynach, where he continued to be an active member of the Welsh political party Plaid Cymru. He suffered a stroke in 1981, which had a negative effect on his physical health for the remainder of his life. Nonetheless, despite his health, he continued to actively write and publish new material, serving an editor of Barn, a Welsh-language current affairs magazine, from 1980 until 1985. He died in Merthyr Tydfil on 29 August 1997, at the age of 81, leaving behind his wife and son.
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