A walk in Milk Wood

Writer Dylan Thomas and broadcaster Cerys Matthews grew up looking at the same view of Swansea Bay and share a love of nature and landscape - now Cerys has brought one of his most famous works to life for a new, younger audience

- Margaret Bartlett

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' Under Milk Wood - an L 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 the "cobble, donkey, goose, and gooseberry street" of fictional seaside village Llareggub (bugger all backwards).

A GATEWAY TO LLAREGGUB

It took Cerys 10 years to bring this, her fourth book for children, to fruition. After getting the blessing of Thomas's family, including his granddaughter Hannah Ellis, Cerys created an abridged version "to exist as a gateway for those who are not old enough for the full-fat version". "The original is so exceptionally brilliant, but it wasn't something I could read, as it was, to my very young children," she explains. "I love books that sound great and are so characterful and books that have such great texts that you bring them along with you during the daytime. That's where the idea was born really."