New Writing

Three UEA alumni have been included in the category shortlists for the 2016 Wales Book of the Year Award. I Saw A Man by Owen Sheers and We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris (both Faber) are shortlisted for The Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award. Woman Who Brings The Rain by Eluned Gramich (New Welsh Rarebyte) is shortlisted for the Open University in Wales Creative Non-Fiction Award. Owen graduated from the MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) in 1998 and published his first collection of poetry, The Blue Book, in 2000. His first work of non-fiction, The Dust Diaries, was the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year in 2005, while his second collection of poetry, Skirrid Hill, won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award. Eluned graduated from the MA in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) in 2012. She is the translator of the German short story collection Goldfish Memory by Monique Schwitter (Parthian Books). Woman Who Brings the Rain is a memoir of her stay in Hokkaido, Japan, in 2012, and last year won the WWF Cymru Prize for Writing On Nature & The Environment at the New Welsh Writing Awards. Thomas (pictured) graduated from the Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) MA in 2013 and published We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, his debut collection of short stories, last year. Currently the editor of the Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly, in 2014 he edited ‘Dubliners 100’, a centenary collection of new short stories by Irish writers based on James Joyce’s Dubliners. Earlier this year he was longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. The Wales Book of the Year Award is administered by Literature Wales with funding from the Arts Council of Wales. Each category winner receives £2,000 and the overall winner then wins an additional £6,000.