Wiliam Owen Roberts was born in 1960 in Bangor in north Wales. One of Wales's foremost novelists, his work includes plays and several television series. The first, Bingo! (Annwn, 1985), displays a nascent literary virtuosity. Y Pla (Pestilence; Annwn, 1987) is an ambitious work set in Wales, the Near-East and Europe in the fourteenth century. Now widely translated and published worldwide, it established Roberts as a major writer. A further work, Hunangofiant (Autobiography; 1990), is a reaction to the suffering of the Thatcher years, whilst Paradwys (Paradise; Barddas, 2001), is a monumental book set in the late eighteenth-century.
His most recent novel, Petrograd (Barddas, 2008), won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2009. Wiliam Owen Roberts lives in Cardiff.
