Blasu by Manon Steffan Ros wins the award for best Welsh-language fiction at the Wales Book of the Year Award Ceremony. Also on the shortlist of three was Ras Olaf Harri Selwyn by Tony Bianchi. Banjo by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch and Burying the Wren by Deryn Rees-Jones were competing with Clueless Dogs by Rhian Edwards for the poetry award. Read the full press release by Literature Wales below.

At the Wales Book of the Year Award Ceremony on 18 July, it was announced that Rhian Edwards is the winner of the Wales Book of the Year Award 2013 for her debut poetry collection Clueless Dogs (Seren). Rhian won the Poetry Category which is known as the Roland Mathias Poetry Award, and the judges believed that her collection was deserving of the overall title of Wales Book of the Year 2013. Rhian is an immensely popular performance poet who also won both the judges and audience prizes in the 2011 John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry. Rhian was awarded a Literature Wales New Writer’s Bursary in 2012 to work on her next poetry collection. The readers of Wales agreed wholeheartedly with the judge’s choice this year, as Rhian also topped the public vote for the Media Wales People’s Prize.

The winners were announced at an Award Ceremony hosted by Gavin & Stacey actor Steffan Rhodri and popular Welsh TV presenter Ffion Davis at the spectacular Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. The cheques and trophies were presented to the winners by The Minister for Culture and Sport, John Griffiths, and the Chair of the Arts Council of Wales, Dai Smith.

The winner of the Fiction Category for 2013 is James Smythe for his post-apocalyptic novel The Testimony (Blue Door). John Harrison, whose book Cloud Road (Parthian) was named Wales Book of the Year in 2011 topped the Creative Non-fiction Category again this year with Forgotten Footprints (Parthian).

Each category winner was awarded £2,000, and the main award winner in each language received an additional £6,000. The 2013 English-language judges were Ffion Hague, Richard Marggraf Turley, and Jasper Fforde.

The overall winner of the Welsh-language Wales Book of the Year Award was Heini Gruffudd for his book Yr Erlid (Y Lolfa), a harrowing tale of his German-born mother’s life during the Second World War. 2013 was a successful year for performance poets as the Welsh-language Poetry Award was presented to Aneirin Karadog for O Annwn i Geltia (Cyhoeddiadau Barddas) – also his first collection. The Fiction Category winner was Manon Steffan Ros for her novel, Blasu (Y Lolfa).

Wales Book of the Year Award is administrated by Literature Wales and run in partnership with Arts Council Wales, The Brecknock Society, Pethe, Golwg350, Media Wales and The Welsh Books Council.