Owen Sheers

Owen Sheers was born in 1974, spent a portion of his childhood abroad, then returned to live on a farm in Abergavenny when he was nine. Educated at Oxford, with an MA in Creative Writing from the UEA writing programme, he has worked in television in London and Wales. Sheers hit the limelight in 2000 when for The Times of January 1st, 2000, David Bailey photographed the foremost practitioners in the arts and sciences together with their choice of the person they expected to carry the discipline forward: Poet Laureate Andrew Motion selected Owen as the poet to watch. His first collection, The Blue Book (Seren, 2000), was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize Best First Collection and ACW Book of the Year 2001. Skirrid Hill, his second collection, won a Somerset Maugham Prize in 2006 and was longlisted for Welsh Book of the Year.

In 2012 Owen was the first ever Artist in Residence for the Welsh Rugby Union. His resulting non-fiction work on the Welsh team, Calon, was published by Faber in February 2013. Owen’s debut prose work The Dust Diaries (Faber), won the Welsh Book of the Year 2005. His first novel, Resistance (Faber), has been translated into eleven languages.

In 2009 Owen contributed to Seren’s ‘New Stories from the Mabinogion’ series with White Ravens, a contemporary response to the myth of Branwen Daughter of Llyr. His latest novel, I Saw A Man (Faber), was published in June 2015.

To find out more about Owen Sheers visit his website: www.owensheers.co.uk