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 shortlisted 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 travel memoir set in Zimbabwe - was published in the UK, US and Holland and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and won the Welsh Book of the Year Award 2005.

Owen has also written for radio, TV and newspapers and has toured extensively, most recently in New York, Croatia and Hungary. 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'. Unicorns, almost his one man play about WWII poet Keith Douglas, will be produced by Old Vic Productions in Spring 2006. His second poetry collection, Skirrid Hill, is published in October and he is currently working on his first novel, due for publication by Faber in Spring 2007.