A DUO of celebrated Meirionnydd wordsmiths have been added to an illustrious list of the UK’s most notable people.

The latest update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has been published and adds biographies of Gerallt Lloyd Owen and Rhiannon Davies Jones, who both died in the year 2014.

Llanderfel-born Gerallt Lloyd Owen (1944-2014) was a Welsh-language poet and publisher who twice won the bardic chair in the National Eisteddfod, and who, along with Dic Jones and Alan Llwyd, was credited with reinstating ’cynghanedd’ poetry (the old medium of medieval Welsh praise poets) to a position of canonical importance in Welsh literature.

An uncompromising nationalist, he was best known for his poems protesting against the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales in 1969 and his historical poems lamenting the loss of native rule; and from 1979 to 2011 as the adjudicator of the BBC Radio Cymru programme, Talwrn y Beirdd.

Historical novelist Rhiannon Davies Jones (1921-2014) was born in Llanbedr before lecturing in Welsh at Caerleon College of Education and then Normal College, Bangor, was renowned as “one of the best stylists of late 20th-century Welsh prose”.

Her historical novels – hailed as “meticulously researched, and exhibiting an enormous talent for historical empathy” – won her many prizes at the National Eisteddfod.

She was perhaps best known for her trilogy set in the Wales of the princes, Cribau Eryri (1987), Barrug y Bore (1989), and Adar Drycin (1993).

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