News of the World tells how a young man from north Wales found the means to give shape a youthful dream of ‘going to live’ on Inis Mór, an adventure recorded in his acclaimed first memoir An Aran Keening. 

 Down but not quite out, he works his way towards Aran - first as a local news reporter on £5 a week in mining towns and villages in the Amman Valley in Wales. From there, he washes up in a condemned property at Waterloo on the Mersey shore in outer Liverpool and finally, aged twenty-one, finds himself in central London and the BBC’s Radio Newsroom at Broadcasting House. 

After amassing enough money to keep him afloat on Inis Môr for a year, he sets out and, at the end of October 1968, he waved goodbye to a highly promising career, his colleagues, friends and even to his future wife: all to fulfil a dream he had when sixteen, first looking into J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands, as if it was Chapman’s Homer and he John Keats.