Born and brought up in Tredegar, Christopher Meredith is a novelist, poet and translator from Welsh into English. He’s the author of five novels, a collection of short stories, and numerous collections of poetry. Awards include an Eric Gregory Award (Society of Authors) and the Welsh Arts Council Young Writer Prize for poetry. His groundbreaking first novel, Shifts, won the Arts Council Fiction Prize on publication and was more recently shortlisted for the title of Greatest Welsh Novel of All Time. Other books have been both shortlisted and longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award.

Chris has spoken at the Hay Festival many times, the Edinburgh Festival, the London Book Fair, the Ledbury Poetry Festival, the Leipzig Book Fair, the Gasteig in Munich and at the Writers and Teachers' Centre in Manhattan, New York. His work’s been read on BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, Radio Wales and BBC 1. He’s given readings of his work and talks and lectures all over Britain as well as in the Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, France, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Slovenia and the USA.

Chris has been a steelworker a schoolteacher and an academic. He now writes full time, lives in Brecon and is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, and Emeritus Professor of creative writing at the University of South Wales.

His collection of poems, Still, and novel, Please, were published simultaneously in 2021 and have been selected to the WLE Bookcase for 2021-2, which is a collection of titles from Wales recommended for translation.

Photo: copyright Gareth Writer-Davies