Owen Sheers is a novelist, poet and playwright. Born in Fiji in 1974. Brought up in London and Abergavenny, south Wales, he read English at New College, Oxford before gaining an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is Professor in Creativity at Swansea University.

The winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the Vogue Young Writer's award 1999, his debut collection The Blue Book (Seren, 2000), was short-listed for the Forward Prize Best First Collection and the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year award in 2001. The Independent on Sunday named him as one of Britain's Top Thirty young writers. The Dust Diaries (Faber & Faber, 2004), a non-fiction narrative set in Zimbabwe was short-listed for the Royal Society of Lite Literature's Ondaatje Prize and won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2005. Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2005) won a Society of Authors Somerset Maugham Award. His first novel Resistance was published by Faber & Faber in 2007 and has been released as a film. His second novel, I Saw a Man (Faber, 2015) was published in June 2015.

Pink Mist (Faber & Faber, 2013) a verse-drama about three young soldiers from Bristol who are deployed to Afghanistan won Wales Book of the Year 2014.

The Green Hollow is based on a film-poem he created for a BBC production, which earned a BAFTA and Grierson nomination. The verse-drama presents the collective memory of the Aberfan disaster, collated from interviews, and was selected to the 2018 WLE Bookcase.

He is co-chair (English language) of Wales PEN Cymru.

@owensheers