Angharad Price and Francesca Reece to Showcase Contemporary Welsh Fiction at Indian Literary Festivals

We are delighted to continue relationships with partners and grateful to our funders for the support to take two exciting Welsh women writers to India this month. Alexandra Büchler, director of our sister organisation Literature Across Frontiers will accompany novelists Angharad Price and Francesca Reece to Kerala and Kolkata, where they will speak at the 9th Kerala Literature Festival and the 49th Kolkata Book Fair. The visit coincides with the publication of a new anthology of short stories by contemporary Welsh women writers, published by Sampark and aimed at introducing these compelling voices to the English-speaking Indian literary audience and international publishers alike.

Angharad Price is one of Wales' most acclaimed contemporary authors. Her novel The Life of Rebecca Jones won the Wales Book of the Year Award and has been translated into multiple languages including Bengali. Known for her lyrical prose and profound exploration of memory, place, and identity, Price's work is deeply rooted in the landscapes and communities of northwest Wales. Her recent novel Nelan a Bo - a meditation on loss, belonging, and the weight of history - was nominated for the Literature Wales Book of the Year prize in 2025 and was selected for our Autumn Bookshelf. Recently an English translation has been awarded a grant from our Translation Grants Fund and will be published on 2027 by Peirene Press.

Francesca Reece is a writer from the north east of Wales, with roots in India on her mother’s side. Her debut novel, Voyeur, was published by Tinder Press in 2021. Her second novel, Glass Houses (2025), was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award, and her third, Sleaze—a comedy about an expat translator living in the Mediterranean will be published in 2027 by Serpent’s Tail in the UK and Doubleday in the US. Her first two novels have been published in German translation by Fischer Verlag, and both have been optioned for potential screen adaptation. She was the recipient of the 2019 Desperate Literature Prize, and her work has appeared in The London Magazine, Banshee, Literary Review, Elle UK, and on BBC Short Works. She lives in London.

Both authors will attend the Kerala Literature Festival, speaking on January 23rd on a panel titled "Power, Revolution and the European Imagination" alongside Slovak writer Lukas Cabala, with Alexandra Büchler moderating. The panel promises to explore how contemporary European writers are grappling with questions of political change, cultural identity, and the role of literature in times of upheaval.

They will then travel to Kolkata for the 49th Kolkata Book Fair, where on January 27th they will speak with Sunandan Roy Chowdhury of Sampark publishers about A New Welsh Tapestry, the new anthology and contemporary Welsh writing.

The new anthology, published by Sampark and edited by Nici Beech has been supported by Creative Wales as part of our programme to develop translation in Wales and features short stories by six Welsh women writers, offering readers a chance to discover the versatility and range of contemporary Welsh literature.

As Casi Dylan writes in the introduction, "Readers discovering these voices for the first time meet them at an exciting juncture, where previously entrenched boundaries between Wales' literary cultures are increasingly shifting and flexing, and where literature itself is forming a building ground for shared understanding."

This visit is supported by Wales Arts International and builds on ongoing cultural exchanges between Wales and India, strengthening literary connections and introducing new audiences to the richness of Welsh writing in both Cymraeg and English.