Discover the Powyses

Everyone who has enjoyed and benefited from his work will celebrate John Cowper Powys’s 150th anniversary this year. Of all twentieth-century novelists writing in English, he seems to me the one who most liberates the mind of the reader from conventional views of the human world. Subscribing to no orthodoxy, he conveys experience in all its miscellaneous variety, contradictions and strangeness. Capturing subtle and fleeting sensations, he has been described as the Dorset Proust. But John Cowper Powys is not only an intrepid explorer of the human scene. He leads the reader out into the numinous green woods and fields, the wind and the skies, and points to the unfathomable reaches beyond. No writer seems to me more needed, and more invigorating, in our unsettled times.

John Gray

I read A Glastonbury Romance when I was 16 and it changed my life.

The Reverend Richard Coles (quoted 29 Sep 2022 on BBC R3 Arts & Ideas)

A genius — a fearless writer, who writes with reckless passion.

Margaret Drabble on John Cowper Powys

Theodore Powys wrote extraordinary fables of English country life. Bloomsbury admirers hailed them as the singular works of a dark and brooding genius.

P. Wright

The one author I could not live without is John Cowper Powys.

Bernard Cornwell

Llewelyn Powys is one of those rare writers who teach endurance of life as well as its enjoyment.

Philip Larkin

I touch here upon what is to me one of the profoundest philosophical mysteries: I mean the power of the individual mind to create its own world, not in complete independence of what is called ‘the objective world’, but in a steadily growing independence of the attitudes of the minds toward this world. For what people call the objective world is really a most fluid, flexible, malleable thing. It is like the wine of the Priestess Bacbuc in Rabelais. It tastes differently; it is a different cosmos, to every man, woman, and child. To analyse this ‘objective world’ is all very well, as long as you don't forget that the power to rebuild it by emphasis and rejection is synonymous with your being alive.

John Cowper Powys

Even though we waves lie for centuries in the deeps of the waters, so deeply buried that no man could think that we should ever rise, yet as all life must come to the surface again and again, awakening each time from a deep sleep as long as eternity, so we are raised up out of the deeps high above our fellows, to obey the winds, to behold the sky, to fly onwards, moving swiftly, to complete our course, break and sink once more. We, who are waves, know you, who are men, only as another sea, within which every living creature is a little wave that rises for a moment and then breaks and dies. Our great joy comes when we break, yours when you are born, for you have not yet reached that sublime relationship with God which gives the greatest happiness to destruction.

T.F. Powys

No sight that the human eyes can look upon is more provocative of awe than is the night sky scattered thick with stars.

Lleweyn Powys