Goronwy Rees (1909 – 1979) was a Welsh journalist, academic, and writer. Born in Aberystwyth as the youngest son of four of Reverend Richard Rees and Apphla James, the family moved to Cardiff in 1923, where Rees gained a scholarship to New College, Oxford. As an undergraduate Rees wrote his first novel, The Summer Flood (1932), the first of ten books he would write during his lifetime. Graduating with a First and as an elected Fellow of All Souls, Rees turned to journalism, spending much of the 1930s reporting from Berlin. In these intellectual circles he met Guy Burgess, Elizabeth Bowen, and Rosamond Lehman, the latter two with whom he would have an affair, before settling down to marry Margaret Morris in 1940. On the outbreak of World War Two, Rees was commissioned to the Royal Welch Fusiliers, until 1946 when he returned to the UK to work in the political section at MI6.
By 1953, Rees left London for Aberystwyth, becoming principal of the University College of Wales, only to resign in 1957 as suspicions arose around his involvement with Guy Burgess, his friend turned Russian spy. Although not officially one of the Cambridge Five, in 1999, twenty years after his death of cancer, it was revealed that Rees had been recruited by Burgess as a Soviet agent in the early 1930s. Despite supplying no information of value and cutting ties with the Soviets after the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, Rees’s literary achievements have often been overshadowed by his entanglements with MI6 and the Soviets, yet his work still deserves to be read as a significant Welsh voice in 20th-century literature.Goronwy Rees (1909 – 1979) was a Welsh journalist, academic, and writer. Born in Aberystwyth as the youngest son of four of Reverend Richard Rees and Apphla James, the family moved to Cardiff in 1923, where Rees gained a scholarship to New College, Oxford. As an undergraduate Rees wrote his first novel, The Summer Flood (1932), the first of ten books he would write during his lifetime. Graduating with a First and as an elected Fellow of All Souls, Rees turned to journalism, spending much of the 1930s reporting from Berlin. In these intellectual circles he met Guy Burgess, Elizabeth Bowen, and Rosamond Lehman, the latter two with whom he would have an affair, before settling down to marry Margaret Morris in 1940. On the outbreak of World War Two, Rees was commissioned to the Royal Welch Fusiliers, until 1946 when he returned to the UK to work in the political section at MI6. By 1953, Rees left London for Aberystwyth, becoming principal of the University College of Wales, only to resign in 1957 as suspicions arose around his involvement with Guy Burgess, his friend turned Russian spy. Although not officially one of the Cambridge Five, in 1999, twenty years after his death of cancer, it was revealed that Rees had been recruited by Burgess as a Soviet agent in the early 1930s. Despite supplying no information of value and cutting ties with the Soviets after the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, Rees’s literary achievements have often been overshadowed by his entanglements with MI6 and the Soviets, yet his work still deserves to be read as a significant Welsh voice in 20th-century literature.
