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. One of his stories was selected for the Dalkey anthology Best European Fiction 2011.

Petrograd (Barddas, 2008), won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2009 and was published in English translation by Parthian in 2014. The second novel in the trilogy, Paris (Barddas, 2013) was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award in 2014. In 2014, the novel was also awarded an English PEN translation grant. Wiliam Owen Roberts lives in Cardiff.

His latest novel, Cymru Fydd, is selected to our 2023 Bookshelf.