Richards received a University of Glamorgan honorary degree in 2002

Mr Richards, from Pontypridd, used his experiences in jobs as varied as sailor and probation officer to colour his writing.

He was best-known for writing the hit 1970s TV series The Onedin Line.

He also wrote for radio, a series of novels and plays, and about the glory years of Welsh rugby.

He turned a very scathing eye on what he regarded as the nouveau riche within Welsh life Dai Smith

Mr Richards went to Pontypridd Grammar School, Gwent College of Education and University College, Swansea.

The Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature said his life before becoming a full-time writer also included two years as a hospital patient and 10 years as a teacher in Cardiff.

He wrote novels including The Elephant You Gave Me (1963) and The Home Patch (1966), before moving to Swansea in 1967 to devote himself full time to writing.

Bloomsbury said he rejected "a romanticized Welsh past of myth and anecdote and is concerned instead with the modern Wales of rugby, beauty queens, television, the language question and the industrial and spiritual decline in the south Wales valleys".

Peter Gilmore and Jessica Benton played James and Elizabeth Onedin

His friend Professor Dai Smith, pro vice-chancellor of the University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, described him as an incredibly industrious writer who "mined a deep seam".

'Soulful relationships'

Prof Smith told BBC Radio Wales: "He was the supreme analyst and fictional chronicler of post-war south Wales.

"He turned his attention to that Wales which was moving away from mining and steel. His novels, but particularly his short stories, were this intricate pattern about soulful relationships with women very much to the core as his truth tellers.

"He used them (women) as people who were in that Wales of the '40, '50s and '60s in a slightly subservient position, and so he could use them to expose the illusions and hypocrisies and snobberies which he absolutely detested in most of contemporary Welsh life."

Prof Smith told Good Morning Wales that Mr Richards grew up in the depression of the 1930, although not in poverty himself.

The key factor, he said, in understanding him was the effect of World War II and the "resounding echo" of World War I on that generation, which had as great an influence as the decline of coal and the great strikes of the era.

Mr Richards wrote many of the scripts for The Onedin Line, a seafaring BBC 19th Century costume drama.

His short story collections include Dai Country (1974)and The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1976), he edited The New Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories (1993), and turned an eye to Welsh rugby in A Touch of Glory (1980) and a memoir of the coach Carwyn James in 1984.

Prof Smith said: "He turned a very scathing eye on what he regarded as the nouveau riche within Welsh life: those who he felt were usurping the positions that a more significant and more democratic society had taken.

"He resented that bitterly and was a scathing denouncer of it." Mr Richards leaves a wife, Helen, and four children.