Caryl Lewis is a multi-award-winning Welsh novelist, children's author, playwright and screenwriter. Her breakthrough novel Martha, Jac a Sianco is widely regarded as a modern classic of Welsh literature, and sits on the Welsh curriculum. The film adaptation, with a screenplay by Lewis herself, won six Welsh BAFTAS and the Atlantis Prize at the 2009 Moondance Festival in Colorado. She is a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff University, and lives with her family on a farm near Aberystwyth.

She came to prominence as an author with Martha, Jac a Sianco (Y Lolfa, 2004), which won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2005. This is a novel that tells the tale of two brothers and a sister living in the countryside of Ceredigion. In 2007 Parthian published Gwen Davies's English translation of the novel, Martha, Jack and Shanco.

Y Gemydd (The Jeweller, Y Lolfa 2007) was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award in 2008 as was her novel Naw Mis (Nine Months, Y Lolfa 2009) in 2010. An English translation of Y Gemydd was published by Honno in 2019 as The Jeweller, translated again by Gwen Davies, and was selected to our 2020–21 Bookcase.

Caryl Lewis won the Wales Book of the Year Award for the second time in 2016, with her tenth novel, Y Bwthyn (The Cottage, Y Lolfa, 2015). Y Gwreiddyn (The Root), was published by the Lolfa in 2016, and was shortlisted for Welsh Book of the Year Award 2017. This collection of short stories relates to nature, relationships, love and loss.

In 2023, she won the Wales Book of the Year for the third time for her debut English novel Drift, making her the first writer ever to have won in both languages. Translated into Malayalam by A V Sreekumar it was published in 2023 by DC Books. Her second English novel Bitter Honey was published in 2025 and has been published in German by Klett-Cotta, translated by Monika Köpfer.

She has also written extensively for cinema and television. Caryl’s television credits include adapting Welsh-language scripts for the acclaimed crime series 'Y Gwyll / Hinterland' which was produced back-to-back in Welsh and English, as well as a writer on the bilingual drama serial 'Craith / Hidden'. The series has been sold to international broadcasters in Denmark, Norway, Slovenia, Finland, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands.

In January 2019 she was one of the authors who took part in a two-city programme of literary debates, theatre, dance and film in Calicut and Mumbai, organised by Literature Across Frontiers and Wales Literature Exchange. Also in 2019 she was one of four European authors who toured South East Asia with Literature Across Frontiers to meet audiences and fellow authors from the region. They appeared at the Singapore Writers Festival, and took part in the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT) Conference programme in Macau.

Caryl took part in a discussion panel on 'A Different Window onto the World: Indigenous Language Literature, Identity and Translation in Scotland, Wales and Europe' in the 2019 London Book Fair. (see photos here)

Caryl Lewis was included in the literary magazine Words Without Borders' Welsh-language issue. You can read the titular story of her short story collection Y Gwreiddyn, "The Root", translated into English by George Jones here