Owen Sheers author page

Owen Sheers biography

Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet, author, playwright, and television presenter. He was born in Fiji and raised in Abergavenny, Wales. Sheers studied at New College, Oxford. His debut poetry collection, The Blue Book, was published in 2000 and shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize Best First Collection and the Welsh Book of the Year. His second collection, Skirrid Hill (2005), won a Somerset Maugham Award.

Sheers’s first prose work, The Dust Diaries (2004), is a non-fiction narrative about his great-great-uncle, missionary Arthur Shearly Cripps, and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His debut novel, Resistance, appeared in 2007 and was translated into ten languages. The novel was adapted into a film released in 2011.

He has written several plays, including The Two Worlds of Charlie F., which won the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award in 2012. Sheers also wrote Pink Mist, a verse drama first performed at Bristol Old Vic in 2015, which won the Wales Book of the Year in 2016.

Sheers has presented and written for television, including the BBC series A Poet’s Guide to Britain. He has served as Professor in Creativity at Swansea University. In 2018, he published To Provide All People, a poem marking the 70th anniversary of the NHS, which was broadcast as a BBC film.

Owen Sheers’s work has received multiple awards and nominations, including the Somerset Maugham Award, Wales Book of the Year, and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award.