The White Trail

Fflur Dafydd, (b.1978), is a novelist, critic and musician from Carmarthen, West Wales. She first came to prominence after winning the Literature Medal at the Urdd National Eisteddfod in 1999 while still a student of English at Aberystwyth, an award which led to publishing her critically-appraised collection of stories and poems, Y Gwir Am Gelwydd (“The Truth About Lies”) at the age of 20.

Having gained an MA in Creative Writing from UEA, a PhD on the poetry of R.S. Thomas from the University of Wales, she then continued to work in several mediums, writing for stage, screen and radio before settling on her preferred medium of fiction. Her first novel Lliwiau Liw Nos (“Colours by Night”, Y Lolfa) was published in 2005 while her second novel Atyniad (“Attraction”, Y Lolfa) was awarded the prestigious prose medal at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 2006. She published her first English novel, Twenty Thousand Saints, with Alcemi Press in Autumn 2008, a novel which received the Oxfam Hay Emerging Writer of the Year Award at the Guardian Hay Festival 2009. Her fourth Welsh-language novel won the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize at the National Eisteddfod 2009.

She has been a writer-in-residence on Bardsey Island (2002) and in Helsinki (2006) and was recently chosen by the British Council as the first ever Welsh participant on Iowa University’s International Writing Program. She travels regularly to literary festivals across the world. She is also a popular singer-songwriter who performs regularly in Wales and further afield.