Owen Sheers

Owen Sheers was born in Fiji in 1974 and brought up in Abergavenny, South Wales. The winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 1999 Vogue Young Writer's Award, his first collection of poetry, The Blue Book (Seren, 2000) was short-listed for the Welsh Book of the Year and the Forward Prize Best First Collection 2001. His debut prose work The Dust Diaries (Faber, 2004), a non-fiction narrative set in Zimbabwe, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize and won the Welsh Book of the Year 2005. In 2004 he was Writer in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust and was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Twenty Next Generation Poets'. Owen's second collection of poetry, Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2005) won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award and is a WJEC and AQA A level set text. Unicorns, almost his one man play based on the life and poetry of the WWII poet Keith Douglas was developed by Old Vic, New Voices. Owen's first novel, Resistance, has been translated into eight languages. His recent collaboration with composer Rachel Portman, The Water Diviner's Tale, an oratorio for children, was premiered at the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms 2007. His essay Bomb Gone, about Britain's Christmas Island thermonuclear tests, appears in Granta 101. Owen is currently a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.