Lloyd Jones obituary

My friend, Lloyd Jones, who has has died aged 74, wrote novels, short stories and poems in Welsh and English. His first novel, Mr Vogel (2004), won the 2005 McKitterick prize and his second, Mr Cassini, was Wales Book of the Year in 2007. Both were fantastical considerations of childhood, mixed up with dream sequences and set in Wales and on the Welsh borders. Lloyd was born in Colwyn Bay, north Wales, and brought up on a hill farm in Gwytherin, a village on the edge of the Hiraethog moor. His father, George, ran the farm, while his mother, Mary (nee Davies), had worked in domestic service. His childhood was disrupted by a year spent in hospital with Perthes’ disease and then his parents’ divorce, after which he remained with his alcoholic father to help on the farm. Only the intervention of his aunts ensured that he eventually caught up on his education, as a boarder at Ellesmere college in Shropshire. After a spell working on a farm, he became a trainee reporter on the North Wales Pioneer in Colwyn Bay in 1972, although he soon left that position to take a degree in Welsh and English at Bangor University. While there he took part in an experiment in which students lived together