BIOGRAPHIES
The Authors
Trezza Azzopardi was born and grew up in Cardiff. She has an MA in Film Studies from the University of Derby, and in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She taught at South East Derbyshire College for ten years before becoming a writer, and has since returned to UEA as a lecturer in Creative Writing. She has written four novels: her first, The Hiding Place, won the 2001 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Remember Me (2004) and Winterton Blue, (2007) were both listed for the Wales Book of the Year. Her latest novel, The Song House, has been serialised on BBC Radio 4. Her novella The Tip of My Tongue, based on one of the tales from The Mabinogion, was published in October 2013.
She also writes short stories, which have been widely anthologised, essays, and occasional pieces for radio. Her work has been translated into twenty languages.
She lives in Norwich.
Zillah Bethell lives in Maesteg and has two novels published by Seren, Seahorses are Real and Le Temps des Cerises. The current quote on Zillah’s pinboard is: With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world (Max Ehrmann). She is starting to work on a new book, King Of Infinite Space.
Sarah Coles tries her best not to write anything at all. She has a job in a primary school and has even had three children to use as an excuse not to write. Occasionally, when she is off her guard, a piece of work emerges against her will. Her poetry collection, Here and The Water (Gomer, 2012) is an example. She has also written reviews for literary magazines and has found her writing placed in many anthologies of poetry and short stories. She lives in Swansea where she is currently trying not to study for a PhD in Short Fiction.
Mary-Ann Constantine is a university research fellow specialising in Romantic-period literature from Wales. She lives in Ceredigion with her husband and four children. She has published two collections of stories, The Breathing (Planet, 2008) and All The Souls (Seren, 2013); a short novel, Star-Shot, is due out with Seren later in 2015.
Carys Davies is the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush (Salt 2007) and The Redemption of Galen Pike (Salt 2014). She has won the Royal Society of Literature’s V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize and the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Short Story Award, and been shortlisted or longlisted for many other prizes including the Roland Mathias Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Wales Book of the Year and the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen Prize. Born in Llangollen, she grew up in South Wales and in the Midlands, and now lives in Lancaster.
One of Deborah Kay Davies’ main concerns has been to explore the possibilities of the short story. Her first work of fiction, Grace, Tamar, and Laszlo the Beautiful (Parthian) was a connected sequence of stories that won Wales Book of the Year 2009. Her first novel, True Things About Me, (2010) was developed from a short story, and led to Davies being chosen as one of the 12 best new British novelists by the BBC Culture Show. Her most recent novel, Reasons She Goes to the Woods, is a montage of single-page flash fictions which was one of only four British novels long-listed for the 2014 Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction.
Stevie Davies, who comes from Morriston, is Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. Stevie has published widely in the fields of fiction, literary criticism, biography and popular history.
The Web of Belonging (1997) was adapted by Alan Plater as a Channel 4 television film. The Element of Water, long-listed for the Booker and Orange Prizes, won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year prize (2002). Stevie’s twelfth novel is Awakening (Parthian, 2010).
Maria Donovan came to Wales as a student and stayed on as a lecturer in Creative Writing at the place formerly known as the University of Glamorgan. With her now late husband she lived for some years on a smallholding in Ceredigion. Her stories appear regularly in magazines and anthologies and her first collection, Pumping Up Napoleon, is published by Seren. Maria has recently completed a crime novel with a ten-year-old protagonist, and is showing an interest in the Durotriges, the Celtic people whose culture and language was dominant in her homeland of Dorset before the Roman invasion.
Joe Dunthorne was born and brought up in Swansea. His debut novel, Submarine, was translated into fifteen languages and adapted for film by Richard Ayoade. His second novel, Wild Abandon, won the Encore Award. His debut poetry pamphlet was published by Faber and Faber. He lives in London.
Eluned Gramich was born in Haverfordwest. Eluned studied English at Oxford and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, before moving to live and work in Japan on a Daiwa scholarship. She has recently translated a collection of German short stories into English, and is currently working on her first novel.
Kate Hamer grew up in Pembrokeshire and after studying Art worked in television for over ten years, mainly on documentaries. She studied for an MA in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University and also joined the Curtis Brown Creative programme. Her debut novel The Girl in The Red Coat is published by Faber & Faber in March 2015 and has sold in five other territories including Germany and Holland. Kate also won the Rhys Davies short story prize in 2011 and her winning story ‘One Summer’ was broadcast on Radio 4. She lives in Cardiff with her husband.
Cynan Jones was born near Aberaeron, Wales in 1975. He is the author of four novels, The Long Dry (Parthian, 2006) – winner of a 2007 Society of Authors Betty Trask Award – Everything I Found on the Beach (Parthian, 2011), Bird, Blood, Snow (Seren 2012), and most recently The Dig (Granta, 2014) – winner of a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. The novels have been translated into several languages, and short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including Granta and New Welsh Review. ‘A Letter from Wales’ was first published by Granta online.
Tyler Keevil was born in Edmonton and grew up in Vancouver, and in his mid-twenties he moved to Wales, where he now lives. He is the author of two novels and a collection of short fiction, and his stories have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies in Britain, Canada, and the United States. He has received numerous awards for his writing, most recently the Writers’ Trust of Canada Journey Prize for his story, ‘Sealskin’. Among other things, he has worked as a tree planter, ice-barge deckhand and shipyard labourer; he currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire.
Jo Mazelis is a novelist, short story writer and essayist. Her collection of stories Diving Girls (Parthian, 2002) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Best First Book and Wales Book of the Year Awards. Her second book, Circle Games (Parthian, 2005), was longlisted for Welsh Book of the Year. She was born in Swansea where she currently lives. Originally trained at Art School, she worked for many years in London in magazine publishing as a freelance photographer, designer and illustrator, before studying for an MA in English Literature. In 2014 her novel Significance was published by Seren.
Robert Minhinnick publishes the novel Limestone Man with Seren in 2015. His short fiction has appeared in Best European Fiction 2014 (Dalkey) and the Library of Wales Story (Parthian, 2014). The unnamed characters, Ffresni and Cai, who appear in ‘Balm-of-Gilead’ also occur in stories published in Wales Arts Review’s ‘Fiction Map of Wales’ and Planet.
Joâo Morais won the 2013 Terry Hetherington Award for Young Writers, and was previously a runner-up in the 2009 Rhys Davies Short Story Award. He was also shortlisted for the Percy French Prize for Comic Verse. He is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Cardiff University. Check him out on twitter: @_JoaoMorais
Thomas Morris is from Caerphilly. His debut story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, is published by Faber & Faber in August 2015. He lives in Dublin, where he is editor of The Stinging Fly.
Holly Müller is a Cardiff-based writer and tutor of Creative Writing at the University of South Wales, where she achieved a first class degree in Creative and Professional Writing, was award
ed the Michael Parnell prize for outstanding creative work, and is now undertaking a Creative Writing PhD. Her debut novel, a historical fiction set in post-war Austria, will be published with Bloomsbury in February 2016. Holly’s short story ‘My Cousin’s Gun’ was published by Parthian Books (Rarebit 2013).
Rachel Trezise is a novelist, short-story writer and playwright from the Rhondda Valley. Her debut short fiction collection, Fresh Apples, won the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2006. Her second short fiction collection, Cosmic Latte, won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize Readers’ Award in 2014.
The Editors
Francesca Rhydderch’s debut novel The Rice Paper Diaries was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and won the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2014. She was also shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in the same year, and her stories have been widely published and broadcast on Radio 4. Other recent projects include a play in Welsh, Cyfaill, which was shortlisted in several categories for the Theatre Critics Wales Awards, including Best Playwright (Welsh-language). A former editor of literary journal New Welsh Review, she is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University.
Penny Thomas has been fiction editor at Seren since 2007 and edited its ‘New Stories from the Mabinogion series’. She is co-founder of the xx women’s writing festival and publisher with Firefly Press, a new children’s and young-adult publisher based in Cardiff and Aberystwyth.
Seren is the book imprint of Poetry Wales Press Ltd
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Stories © the authors
Introduction © Francesca Rhydderch and Penny Thomas
ISBNs
978-1-78172-234-3 Pback
978-1-78172-235-0 Ebook
978-1-78172-236-7 Kindle
The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The publisher works with the financial assistance of The Welsh Books Council
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