Authors
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Dorothy Al Khafaji
Dorothy was born and grew up in Somerset. In Baghdad she trained at the British Council to teach TEFL. Upon return to the UK she taught in Language schools and became a mature student at Portsmouth Poly, followed by a PGCE at University of Surrey. She moved to Wales to start a family business, which she still manages.
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Boyd Clack
Boyd Clack is a Welsh writer, actor and musician. He was born in Vancouver, Canada but grew up in Tonyrefail in Wales. His acting credits include Twin Town, High Hopes and Satellite City. He also co-wrote both High Hopes and Satellite City. He has emerged as a figure of great talent and stature within Welsh performing arts, and holds a cult status amongst fans.
Boyd has released an album, Welsh Bitter, which was met with critical acclaim.He has a great passion for his local community, and the underprivileged youth of the valleys, and is also the Patron of Mental Health Support Organisation – New Horizons. This his first book.
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Deborah Kay Davies
Deborah Kay Davies was born in Pontypool and has lived most of her life in the Eastern valleys of South Wales. Her first collection of poetry, Things You Think I Don’t Know, was published by Parthian in 2006, which was followed by her collection of short stories, Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, which won the Wales Book of the Year Award in 2008.
Her stories have been published in MsLexia, Planet and New Welsh Review and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She is a three-time winner in the Rhys Davies competition. Her poetry has been published in many journals, including Agenda, New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales and Planet. She has given readings at the AWP Conference in Baltimore, USA, and at venues throughout the UK, including Chapter Cardiff, the Hay Festival and the Dulwich Poetry Festival, London.
Deborah is a girl from The Eastern Valley (The Afon Llwyd or the Grey River from Blaenafon to Cwmbran) who failed her 11- plus, went to Secondary Modern and ended up earning a PhD and becoming a published author. She has an M.A. in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University and has taught Creative Writing at Cardiff University and the University of Glamorgan. Her most recent novel is True Things About Me, which is out now with Canongate.
Stevie Davies
Stevie Davies was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, though she lived in Swansea, Wales from a week old, and spent a nomadic childhood in Egypt, Scotland and Germany. After studying at Manchester University, she went on to lecture there, returning to Swansea in 2001. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University.
Stevie is both a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. Awakening, published by Parthian in 2013 is her twelfth novel. Stevie has won numerous awards for her fiction, and has been long-listed for the Booker and Orange Prizes. Several of her books have been adapted into radio and screenplays.
She writes for the Guardian and Independent newspapers, and is a passionate sea-swimmer, cyclist and walker on the Gower.
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Christien Gholson
Christien Gholson is an American born writer currently living in the United Kingdom.
His first published work was the critically-acclaimed book of poetry, On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press, 2006).
His stories, both literary and speculative, have appeared in many magazines and literary journals, including The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Cimarron Review and the influential speculative magazine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
He has been a union organizer, bookseller, cartoonist, teacher, itinerant poet-musician and freelance editor. He grew up in a navy family, never settling in one place for very long, a pattern he has continued as an adult. His childhood years in Italy, the swamps of Florida, and in Belgium – where he spent weekends riding his bike through the alternating industrial and pastoral landscape – have deeply influenced his art. This is his first novel.
Johannes Gramich
Johannes Gramich was born in Munich in 1962. He moved to Wales in 1987 and now lives in Cardiff.
The Bridge Over the River is the first translation of his prize-winning German novel Die Brücke über den Fluss. In it he draws on the experiences of his own family in Czechoslovakia and Germany in the period before, during and after the Second World War.
In his day job, Johannes is a Social Worker, and works predominately with the elderly in Cardiff North. He is also the President of the Cardiff-Stuttgart German-Speaking Association, and plaus the violin in his spare time. He is currently working on a collection of short stories from German.
Niall Griffiths
Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966, studied English, and now lives and works in Aberystwyth. His first four novels areGrits (2000), a tale of addicts and drifters in rural Wales;Sheepshagger (2001), the story of Ianto, a feral mountain boy;Kelly & Victor (2002); and Stump (2003), which won two Book of the Year awards. Grits was made into a film for television, andKelly & Victor and Stump are being made into films.
Niall Griffiths has also written travel pieces, restaurant and book reviews, and radio plays. His last novel is Runt (2006) and his latest non-fiction work is Ten Pound Pom, a travelogue and memoir about his time in Ausralia.
Wil Gritten
Wil Gritten was raised happily in North wales without toy guns or television. At sixteen he left home and moved to Brixton under the pretence of becoming a carpenter. Within a year he found himself alone in India, and started writing. Wil stumbled into a career in modelling, and spent a few years working for some of the largest international fashion brands. He was once voted the thirteenth sexiest man in Wales by The Western Mail. By the age of twenty-five Wil had circumnavigated the globe twice.
He writes and records his own unpleasant variety of music and is an expert in the field of organic vegetable gardening. He is currently living in Australia.
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Craig Hawes
Craig Hawes grew up in Briton Ferry, South Wales. He has worked as a journalist in London and Dubai, where he currently lives. He was shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize 2009, Runner-up in the Rhys Davies Prize 2010, and placed third in the Yeovil Short Story Prize, 2010. Hawe’s short stories have appeared in several publications and prize-winning anthologies including Blue Tattoo, Bristol Prize Anthology in 2009 and 10. He has also had stories and an Afternoon play broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As a journalist Hawes has had work published by theLondon Evening Standard, Sunday Times Style, Big Issue, Time Out Dubai, and many others.
Debz Hobbs-Wyatt
Debz Hobbs-Wyatt was born in Essex and now lives and works as a full time writer from her home in the mountains of Snowdonia. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Bangor University and has had several short stories published. She has also been short listed in a number of writing competitions, including being nominated for the prestigious US Pushcart Prize 2013 and has made the short list of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2013.While No One Was Watching is her debut novel.
Tristan Hughes
Tristan Hughes was born in Atikokan, Canada, and was brought up around Llangoed, Ynys Mon. He was educated at Ysgol David Hughes, Menai Bridge; the universities of York and Edinburgh, and King’s College, Cambridge, where he completed a PhD thesis on Pacific and American Literature. He won the Rhys Davies Short Story award in 2001 for his work A Sort of Homecoming, and his first book of fiction, The Tower, was published to acclaim in 2003. He currently lives in Biwmaris, Ynys Mon.
His latest publication, Eye Lake, is his fourth novel, and is published by Picador.
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Aled Islwyn
Writer, editor and translator, Aled Islwyn has been published extensively in Welsh and English. He has published a book of verse, Dyddiau Gerwyn (The Days of Gerwyn) in 1977, but is predominantly known as a novelist. He won the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize at the National Eisteddfod in 1980 and again in 1985. His collection of short stories, Unigolion, Unigeddau won the Welsh Book of the Year. He was born in Port Talbot in 1953 but has lived and worked in Cardiff for many years. He currently works as a Press Officer for S4C.
Out With It is his third collection of short stories, but his first in English, and was published by Parthian in 2008.
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Angela V. John
Angela V. John is a historian and biographer who has published extensively on women’s and gender history in Britain. She held the chair in History
at the University of Greenwich and is now an honorary professor at Swansea University. She edited Our Mothers’ Land, a pioneering collection of essays on Welsh women’s history, and Unequal Opportunities , a volume about women’s employment opportunities in England between 1800 and 1918. Angela V. John co-edited (with Claire Eustance) The Men’s Share? which examined male support for women’s suffrage and has published the life of Lady Charlotte Guest (with Revel Guest), as well as biographies of Elizabeth Robins, Henry Nevinson, Evelyn Sharp and Lady Rhondda. Her recent books include Rocking the Boat: Welsh Women Who Championed Equality 1840-1990 and The Actors’ Crucible: Port Talbot and the Making of Burton, Hopkins, Sheen and all the others .
Cynan Jones
Cynan Jones was born in Wales in 1975. He determined that at twenty-eight he would make writing his primary occupation for two years. The Long Dry was the third novel to be completed, but the first accepted for publication. It was written in a blaze of clarity in ten days in May 2005.
Cynan currently runs a small wine business and teaches music part-time, but writes increasingly. His children’s story ‘The Piano Player’s Hands’ was included in Richard & Judy’s Winning Stories (Chrysalis Books, 2003) as one of twenty-five winners of their national competition.
His first novel The Long Dry, which follows a farmer Gareth as he tracks down a lost cow who is in calf, won much praise and found critical acclaim overseas in France and Italy. It won the prestigious Betty Trask Award (2007).
The Long Dry (as Longue Secheresse) received great reviews in Le Monde (calling it a ‘book of moving beauty’), the Parisienne literary journal Pagewrites, and magazine Madame - to name three. It was also translated into Italian as Le cose che non vogliamo più, and was well received in the Italian press such as Il Giornale and Terra.
Cynan Jones’ most recent novel, Everything I Found On the Beach, a dark thriller based on the west Wales coast, is out now.
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David Lloyd Owen
David Lloyd Owen lives in West Wales and has spent the last 23 years advising governments, multilateral institutions, financiers and companies about the markets they operate in.
He has written six books on water markets and water finance.
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Sue Moules
Sue Moules graduated from Lampeter in 1979 with a degree in English. As a student she was a member of the New Rhymers group, published poems in the literary magazine Plethora, worked on the college newspaper, 1822, and co-founded the literary magazine .spectrum. She is a founder member of Lampeter Writers' Workshop (1984) and is part of its Red Heron performance group. She is also chair of Teifi Writers, and a member of Cwrtnewydd Scibblers.
Sue's Twitter: @SueMoulesPoetry
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Glen Peters
Glen Peters was brought up in an Anglo-Indian railway community in early post-independence India. His family was from Lucknow. After attending University in London he had a successful career with an international Accounting Firm, retiring in 2010 to live in Pembrokeshire where he now runs an arts charity and a renewables business.The launch of Glen's upcoming second novel Lucknow Ransom took place at Rhosygilwen on June 8th 2013.
Jill Piercy
Jill Piercy is an exhibition curator, consultant and writer specialising in contemporary art and craft in Wales. She has written for numerous publications and has prepared catalogue essays for many galleries in Wales. For six years she was the Art and Craft Officer for the National Eisteddfod of Wales and has curated work for many galleries in Wales, Europe and USA. She has curated three exhibitions of work by Brenda Chamberlain in 1988, 2007 and 2008.
Her full-lenght biography of Brenda Chamberlain, Brenda Chamberlain: Artist & Writer, was published by Parthian in June 2013.
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Bill Rees
Bill Rees lives between Bangor and Montpelier, and makes his self-proclaimed ‘precarious’ living by translating French football matches into English for a Dutch bookmaker, as well as selling the occasional book. As a graduate of Bangor University, Rees worked as a reporter for a local newspaper in London, before the lure of travel and bookselling led him to take a less conventional road. His experiences of bookselling in Wales and France culminated in the creation of The Loneliness of a Long Distance Book Runner, an idiosyncratic tale of friendship and travel, published by Parthian in October 2011.
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Norman Schwenk
Norman Schwenk was born and grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. He completed his academic studies in the United States, before moving to Sweden, and then to Cardiff in 1965 as a Lecturer in American Literature. For many years Norman taught Creative Writing at Cardiff University, before retiring from full-time teaching in 2002, to concentrate upon his own writing and publishing.
His writing has been published in various American and Welsh magazines, and Parthian has published various collections of his work. In 2004 he co-edited an anthology of poems about St Melangell, The Hare That Hides Within, which won an award as a Welsh Books Council Poetry Best-seller. In 2005 Parthian published The More Deceived: Poems about Love and Lovers, in 2015 Book of Songs, and in 2016 Love What is Mortal: Selected Poems, which brings together collections of his poems from the 1960s to the present day.
Dai Smith
Dai Smith was born in the Rhondda in 1945 and educated at Porth County and Barry Grammar School. He read History and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford; Columbia University, New York; and University of Wales, Swansea.
From 1969 to 1993 he taught History at the universities of Lancaster, Swansea and Cardiff. In 1986 he was awarded a Personal Chair by the University of Wales. In 1993 he joined the BBC as Editor of Radio Wales and from 1994 to 2000 was Head of Broadcast (English Language) at BBC Wales where he commissioned a number of notable and award-winning programmes, especially in the Arts and in Drama. Professor Smith is a renowned historian and prolific writer on the arts and cultural issues. He has just completed a major biographical study of the Welsh writer and intellectual, Raymond Williams.
He is well known as a broadcaster on radio and television and is currently the head of the Arts Council of Wales and Research Chair in the Cultural History of Wales at Swansea University.
