Making Literature Travel

Owen Sheers was born in Fiji in 1974. Brought up in London and Abergavenny, south Wales, he read English at New College, Oxford before gaining an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.

The winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the Vogue Young Writer’s award 1999, his debut collection The Blue Book (Seren, 2000), was short-listed for the Forward Prize Best First Collection and the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year award in 2001. The Independent on Sunday named him as one of Britain’s Top Thirty Young Writers. The Dust Diaries (Faber & Faber, 2004), a non-fiction narrative set in Zimbabwe, was short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2005. Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2005) won a Society of Authors Somerset Maugham Award. He currently lives in London where he works as a writer and broadcaster. His first novel, Resistance, was published by Faber & Faber in 2007 and has been released as a film.