Author Biographies

Gwyn Thomas

Gwyn Thomas was born in 1913 in the Rhondda Valley. He studied Spanish at Oxford and spent time in Spain during the early 1930s. He obtained part-time lecturing jobs across England before deciding to become a schoolteacher in Wales. He retired from that profession in 1962 to work full-time as a writer and broadcaster. He wrote extensively across several genres including essays, short stories, novels and plays, and was widely translated. His fictional works include The Dark Philosophers (1946) and All Things Betray Thee (1949), the drama The Keep (1962) and an autobiography, A Few Selected Exits (1968). Gwyn Thomas was given the Honour for Lifetime Achievement by Arts Council Wales in 1976. He died in 1981.

Richard Burton

Richard Burton was born in 1925 in the Afan Valley. He is remembered predominantly for his illustrious stage and screen work, as well as his turbulent private life, but he also wrote copious articles, diary entries and stories during his lifetime. One of these, ‘A Christmas Story’, was published in 1964. He died in 1984. An edited version of his extensive diaries was published in 2012.

Ron Berry

Ron Berry was born in 1920 in Blaenycwm in the Rhondda Valley. The son of a coal miner, he worked in mining until the outbreak of war saw him serving in both the British Army and the Merchant Navy. He studied at the adult education college Coleg Harlech in the 1950s but had further spells in mining and as a carpenter as his writing was never entirely successful enough to sustain him. His fictional output, which included works such as the novels Flame and Slag (1968) and So Long, Hector Bebb (1970), depicted a hard but positive view of the industrial Welsh valleys, entirely bereft of sentimentality and the hype which he scornfully left to others. He died in 1997.

Leslie Norris

Leslie Norris was born in 1921 in Merthyr Tydfil. In 1948, he enrolled in teacher training, and by 1958 had risen to the position of college lecturer. From 1974 onwards, he earned his living by combining full-time writing with residencies at academic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Aside from a dozen books of poems, his prose works include two volumes of short stories, Sliding (1978), which won the David Higham Award, and The Girl from Cardigan (1988), as well as a compilation, Collected Stories, released in 1996. He died in 2006.

Roland Mathias

Roland Mathias was born in 1915 in Talybont-on-Usk, Breconshire, and read modern history at Jesus College, Oxford. He taught in schools until 1969, when he resigned from his job as a headmaster and settled in Brecon in order to write full-time. His contribution to the study of Welsh writing in English, as editor, critic, anthologist, historian, poet and short-story writer, is substantial. He helped to found Dock Leaves, later the Anglo-Welsh Review, which he edited from 1961 to 1976. He published one collection of short stories and nine volumes of poetry. The majority of his writing has to do with the history, people and topography of Wales, especially the border areas. He died in 2007.

Sally Roberts Jones

Sally Roberts Jones was born in 1935 in London. She studied history at University College Bangor, and worked as a librarian before becoming a founding member of the English Language Section of Yr Academi Gymreig, of which she later served as honorary joint Secretary and as Chair from 1993 to 1997. She founded the Alun Books publisher in 1977. She has published a wide variety of books, one of which, 1969’s Turning Away, won the Welsh Arts Council Prize. She has also written for radio, as well as both writing and lecturing on Wales’ cultural and industrial history.

Tony Curtis

An award-winning poet, critic and short-story writer, Tony Curtis was born in Carmarthen in 1946, and studied in both the UK and US before embarking on a career teaching in higher education. He was the first Professor of Poetry at the University of Glamorgan. His books include War Voices (1995) and Heaven’s Gate (2001). He has also published works of literary criticism, both as author and editor. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Welsh Academy.

Tristan Hughes

Tristan Hughes was born in 1972 in Atikokan, Canada, and was brought up in Llangoed, Ynys Môn. He was educated at the Universities of York and Edinburgh, and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he completed a PhD thesis on Pacific and American literature. He won the Rhys Davies Short Story Award in 2001 for his work ‘A Sort of Homecoming’, and his first book of fiction, The Tower, was published in 2003. His fourth novel, Eye Lake, was released in 2012.

Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams was born in 1921 in Pandy, near Abergavenny in Monmouthshire. He was educated locally and at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1939. After the war, he taught in adult education before returning to Cambridge, from where he retired as Professor of Drama in 1983. Although most well known for his academic and critical works, such as Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), he also published seven novels, setting them largely in the land of his childhood: the Welsh border country, which inspired the title of his first, and perhaps greatest novel, Border Country (1960). He died in 1988.

Alun Richards

Alun Richards was born in 1929 in Pontypridd. After spells as a schoolteacher, probation officer and as an instructor in the Royal Navy, from the 1960s he was, and successfully so, a full-time writer. He lived near the Mumbles, close to the sea which, coupled with the hills of the South Wales Valleys, was the landscape of his fiction. Alongside plays for stage and radio, screenplays and adaptations for television, a biography and a memoir, he wrote six novels and two collections of short stories, Dai Country (1973) and The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1976). As editor, he produced bestselling editions of Welsh short stories and tales of the sea for Penguin. He died in 2004.

Sîan James

Sîan James was born in 1932 in Llandysul, Carmarthenshire. After attending the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, she has gone on to on to write and publish a number of acclaimed novels and short-story collections, several of which have won awards, including the Wales Book of the Year Award in 1997 for Not Singing Exactly (1996) and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize twice. Her third novel, A Small Country (1979) was adapted for film as Calon Gaeth (2006) by Stan Barstow and Diana Griffiths, winning a BAFTA Cymru award in the process.

Deborah Kay Davies

Deborah Kay Davies was born in 1956 in Pontypool. Her book of stories Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful (2008) won the Wales Book of the Year award. She has previously published a collection of poems, Things You Think I Don’t Know (2006), and released her first novel True Things About Me in 2010. Her short stories have been published in magazines such as New Welsh Review and Planet, as well as broadcast on BBC radio.

Glenda Beagan

Glenda Beagan was born in Rhuddlan, where she still lives, and was educated at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and the University of Lancaster. She has published three collections of short stories, The Medlar Tree (1992), Changes and Dreams (1996) and The Great Master of Ecstasy (2009), as well as a collection of poems, Vixen (1996). Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including The New Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories (1993), The Green Bridge (1988) and Magpies (2000).

Clare Morgan

Clare Morgan was born in 1953 in Monmouthshire, and now lives in Gwynedd. She gained an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia and a doctorate in English literature from Oxford University, where she is now director of the graduate programme in creative writing. Her novel, A Book for All and None, was published in 2011. Her stories have been commissioned for radio and have been widely anthologised, with such a collection, An Affair of the Heart, appearing in 1996. She won the Arts Council of Wales Short Story Prize, and is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.

Jo Mazelis

Jo Mazelis was born in 1956 in Swansea, where she still lives. Her collection of stories Diving Girls (2002) was shortlisted for Commonwealth Best First Book and Welsh Book of the Year. Her second book Circle Games was published in 2005 and her short stories have been widely published and broadcast by the BBC. Her first novel, Significance, is due to be published in 2014.

Catherine Merriman

Catherine Merriman was born in 1949 in London, but has lived in Wales since 1973. She has published five novels, the first of which, Leaving the Light On (1992), won the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award in 1992, and three short-story collections, including Silly Mothers in 1991, and many of her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in, among others, New Welsh Review, Everywoman and Essentials. She currently teaches writing at the University of South Wales.

Mike Jenkins

Mike Jenkins was born in 1953 in Aberystwyth, and was educated at University College of Wales before becoming an English teacher. He won the 1998 Wales Book of the Year for his short-story collection Wanting to Belong (1997), and he has written two novellas – Barbsmashive (2002) and The Fugitive Three (2008) – and a novel – Question Island (2013). He appears frequently on radio and television, and lives in Merthyr Tydfil.

Leonora Brito

Leonora Brito was born in Cardiff. She studied law and history at Cardiff University. Her story ‘Dat’s Love’ won her the 1991 Rhys Davies Short Story Competition. She also wrote for radio and television, providing a unique insight into Afro-Caribbean Welsh society, largely unrepresented in Welsh writing until her work appeared. She published one collection of stories, Dat’s Love, in 1996. She died in 2007.

Stevie Davies

Stevie Davies was born in Swansea. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Welsh Academy. She has published novels and books in the fields of biography, literary criticism and history. Her novels have been longlisted for the Booker and Orange Prizes and The Element of Water (2001) won the Wales Book of the Year Award for 2002. Her novel Awakening was published in 2013.

Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley was born in 1956 in Bristol, and studied English Literature at Cambridge. She has published four novels and one collection of stories, as well as a work of literary criticism. Her short stories appear regularly in, among others, Granta and the New Yorker. She has lived in Cardiff since 1982.

Huw Lawrence

Huw Lawrence was born in Llanelli, and trained as a teacher in Swansea before resuming his education at Manchester and Cornell Universities. He is a three-time winner of prizes in the Rhys Davies Short Story Competition, a Bridport prize and a runner-up position in the 2009 Tom Gallon Trust Competition. His debut collection of short stories, Always the Love of Someone, was published in 2010. He lives in Aberystwyth.

Gee Williams

Gee Williams was born in Saltney, Flintshire, and studied English at Oxford. She was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for Salvage (2007). Her short-story collection Blood, etc. was published in 2008.

Rachel Trezise

Rachel Trezise was born in 1978 in the Rhondda Valley, where she still lives, and studied at the universities of Glamorgan and Limerick. Her novel In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl won an Orange Futures Award in 2002, and her short-story collection, Fresh Apples (2005) won the inaugural Dylan Thomas Prize. Her play, Tonypandemonium was staged by National Theatre Wales in 2013.

Des Barry

Des Barry was born in 1955 in Merthyr Tydfil, and was educated at University College London. His debut novel, The Chivalry of Crime (2001), won the Western Writers of America’s Best First Novel of the Year Award. Cressida’s Bed was published in 2004 and he has had short stories published in The New Yorker, The Big Issue and Granta, as well as in several anthologies. Aside from Wales, he has lived in Italy, the USA and Tibet.

Nigel Jarrett

Nigel Jarrett was born in Llanfrechfa, Cwmbran. He won the Rhys Davies Award for his short story ‘Mrs Kuroda on Penyfan’. His debut collection of stories, Funderland was published in 2010. He is a former daily-newspaper journalist. Since 1987 he has been music critic of the South Wales Argus and he reviews jazz for Jazz Journal and poetry for Acumen. He lives in Monmouthshire.

Lewis Davies

Lewis Davies was born in 1967 in Penrhiwtyn. His work includes novels, plays, poetry and essays. He won the Rhys

Davies Prize for his story ‘Mr Roopratna’s Chocolate’. His selected stories Love and Other Possibilities was published in 2008. He is one of the founding partners of the publishing company Parthian.

Aled Islwyn

Aled Islwyn was born in 1953 in Port Talbot. He has written and published extensively in Welsh. He won the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize at the National Eisteddfod in 1980 and again in 1985. His collection of short stories, Unigolion, Unigeddau (1994) won the Welsh Book of the Year Prize. Out With It (2008) is his first collection of stories in English.

Siân Preece

Siân Preece was born in Neath, and has lived for extended periods in Canada and France and Scotland. Her story collection, From the Life, was published in 2000. She won first prize in the 2009 Rhys Davies Short Story Competition for her story ‘Getting Up’.

Robert Nisbet

Robert Nisbet was born in 1941 in Haverfordwest, and was educated at Milford Haven Grammar School, University College of Swansea and the University of Essex. His stories have been published in a wide range of magazines in Europe and the United States. As well as enjoying a successful career in education, he has been a regular contributor to BBC radio and has edited a number of short-story anthologies. His selected short-story collection, Downtrain, was published in 2004.

Jon Gower

Jon Gower was born in 1959 in Llanelli, and read English at Cambridge University. He is a writer, performer and broadcaster. He has written books on non-fictional subjects as diverse as a disappearing island in Chesapeake Bay in An Island Called Smith (2001) and a West Wales tour in psycho-geography in Real Llanelli (2000), as well as the fiction of Dala’r Llanw (2009), Uncharted (2010) and Big Fish (2000). Too Cold For Snow, a collection of short stories, was released in 2012.

Robert Minhinnick

Robert Minhinnick was born in 1952 in Neath. He is a poet, essayist, editor and novelist who has twice won the Wales Book of the Year Award: in 1993 for Watching the Fire Eater (1992) and in 2006 for To Babel and Back (2005). His poetry has been published internationally and he has won an Eric Gregory Award and the Cholmondeley Prize.

Emyr Humphreys

Emyr Humphreys was born in 1919 in Prestatyn. A former theatre and television director, drama producer and lecturer, in a long and illustrious career he has written and released twenty novels, several short-story and poetry compilations, and a history volume, as well as produced a number of screenplays. He has won several literary prizes during his career – the 1958 Somerset Maugham Prize for Hear and Forgive (1952), the 1958 Hawthornden Prize for A Toy Epic (1958), and the Welsh Book of the Year Award twice, for Bonds of Attachment (1992) and The Gift of a Daughter (1999). He lives in Llanfairpwll on Anglesey.