Owen Sheers Biography
Owen Sheers was born in Fiji in
1974 and brought up in Abergavenny, South Wales. He was educated at King Henry
VIII comprehensive, Abergavenny and New College, Oxford. 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 1st Collection 2001. His
debut prose work The Dust Diaries (Faber 2004), a non-fiction narrative
set in Zimbabwe, was short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje
Prize and won the Welsh Book of the Year 2005. Sheers has also written for radio,
TV and newspapers. In 2004 he was Writer in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust
and was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society’s 20 Next Generation
Poets. Sheers’s second collection of poetry, Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2005)
won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award. 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.
Sheers’s first novel, Resistance (UK Faber, 2007/ US Nan Talese/Doubleday
2008) won a 2008 Hospital Club Creative Award and was short-listed for the Writers Guild Best Book Award. His 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. Owen Sheers was a 2007 Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
He wrote and presented the BBC 4 TV series A Poet's Guide to Britain and wrote the introduction and selected the poems for the accompanying anthology (Penguin 2009). His novella White Raven's (Seren, 2009), published as part of Seren's 'New Stories from the Mabinogion' series, is a contemporary response to the myth of 'Branwen Daughter of Llyr'. Sheers currently lives in London.
This biography was last updated on 08/09/2011.
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