Stevie Davies is Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University, her home town. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. Stevie has published widely in the fields of fiction, literary criticism, biography and popular history. She has written on Milton and the radicals of the seventeenth century, on Donne, Henry Vaughan, Emily Brontë and Virginia Woolf.

Her first novel, Boy Blue, won the Fawcett Society Book Prize for 1987. This was followed by ten further novels, of which The Web of Belonging (1997) was short-listed for the Portico and Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year. It was adapted as a television film written by Alan Plater, starring Brenda Blethyn, Kevin Whately and Anna Massie and shown on Channel 4 in 2004. Stevie also adapted it as a radio play for Radio 4.

The Element of Water (2001) was long-listed for the Booker and Orange Prizes and won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year; Stevie adapted it as a Radio 4 Saturday Play. The next novel, Kith & Kin, was short-listed for the Orange Prize and is being adapted as a feature film by The Producers’ screenwriter, Sandra Goldbacher.

Into Suez, set in the years leading up to the ‘Suez Crisis’ of 1956, was published by Parthian in 2010, as was her Awakening, in 2013. In 2016, her novella, Equivocator (Parthian) was selcted to the Wales Literature Exchange Bookcase.

Arrest Me, For I Have Run Away (Parthian, 2017) is her first collection of short stories and was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award 2019. Her novel, The Party Wall, was published by Honno in September 2020, and is selected to our 2020–21 Bookcase. Watch Stevie discuss and read from the novel here.