Allen Raine

Born Anne Adalisa Beynon Puddicombe in Newcastle Emlyn, she wrote under the name Allen Raine. Her fiction is closely associated with Wales, especially its landscape, language, and village life, and her work reached a very wide audience in the years around the turn of the 20th century.

She is especially remembered for helping popularize Welsh settings and characters for a broad reading public. A Welsh Singer was one of the books that established her reputation, and by a few years after her death her novels had reportedly sold in the millions.

Today, she is often seen as an important popular voice in Welsh writing: not just a successful novelist, but a writer who made everyday Welsh life feel accessible and memorable to readers far beyond Wales.