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26/10/2014

BBC Radio 4 - Cold War Poet

Stephen Evans explores how Dylan Thomas's work became a British export during the Cold War

Stephen Evans explores how Dylan Thomas's work sustained a generation of East Germans struggling with a totalitarian state and became an export for the British during the Cold War.

Within a year of his death, Dylan Thomas exploded into occupied West Germany with his popular radio play Under Milk Wood. By the end of the 80s, his poetry had firmly established his reputation on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in Communist East Germany. In this programme marking the Welsh poet's centenary, former Berlin correspondent Stephen Evans explores how Dylan Thomas became a cultural export for the British during the Cold War, and how his work helped sustain a generation of East Germans struggling with a totalitarian state trying to control what they read, wrote and thought.

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