Academi Writers Bursaries Panel

Katie Gramich - Chair (from October 2010)
Katie Gramich is a critic and editor. She is currently Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University. Her main area of academic research is Anglophone Welsh writing. Her research interests include the literature of Wales in both languages; Welsh Literary and Cultural Studies; Women’s writing and feminist theory; Post-colonial literature and theory; Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century literature in English; Children’s Literature; Comparative Literature; Translation Studies and Travel Writing. Katie Gramich is a Fellow of Literature Wales. She was a judge for the 2007 Wales Book of the Year Award. She is a native Welsh speaker.

Catrin Beard is an experienced literary critic and frequent reviewer in the Welsh media. She has judged the Prose Medal in the National Eisteddfod of Wales and was a judge for the Wales Book of the Year in 2006. She is a part-time translator for the University of Wales and is also a freelance author and editor. She is familiar as a former television reporter and presenter of Welsh language cultural programmes such as Hel Straeon and Y Sioe Gelf. She edited an anthology of Welsh language poems about Cardiff Cerddi Caerdydd. She has also adapted a variety of English language children’s books into Welsh. She is a member of the National Eisteddfod of Wales’ central Literature Panel.

Catherine Fisher
Catherine Fisher is a poet and novelist from Newport, Gwent. Winner of the Cardiff International Poetry Prize and Welsh Arts Council Young Writers Prize, she has published four collections of poetry. Catherine is also well-known as a writer of novels for children and young adults, often on fantasy or Science Fiction themes. Her books include Darkhenge, The Snow-Walker Trilogy, The Candleman and the four piece Book of the Crow. A recent work, The Oracle Trilogy, was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread prize and is an international bestseller. Corbenic, a novel about the grail legend, won the Mythopoeic Society of America’s Children’s Fiction Award in 2007. Her novel, Incarceron, was the Times Children’s Book of the Year 2007. In October 2011 she was announced by Literature Wales as the first ever Young People's Laureate for Wales.

Amanda Hopkinson
Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. In 2009 Amanda was appointed to a newly created Professorship in Literary Translation at UEA. Her most recent translations have been of Ricardo Piglia’s Money to Burn (Granta, 2003) and Paulo Coelho’s Devil and Miss Prym (HarperCollins, 2002). She is currently writing A History of Mexican Photography (Reaktion Books, forthcoming). 

Carolyn Jess-Cooke
Carolyn Jess-Cooke is a writer and academic from Belfast, Northern Ireland. She gained an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Shakespearean cinema at The Queen’s University of Belfast. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Northumbria. Jess-Cooke’s poetry has appeared in Poetry London, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Ireland Review, and Poetry Wales. Her awards include a Writers’ Award from the Arts Council of England (2005), the Tyrone Guthrie Prize for Poetry (2004), an Eric Gregory Award (2005) and she won second prize in the Literature Wales Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2002. Her first poetry collection Inroads, was published by Seren in 2010.

Idris Reynolds
Poet, librarian and tutor. He has twice won the Chair for strict–metre poetry at the National Eisteddfod, and has also won numerous other prizes. He frequently contributes poems and reviews to the Welsh-language literary periodicals, Barddas and Taliesin. He has published one volume of poetry and is a regular contestant on the popular Radio Cymru show, Talwrn y Beirdd (Battle of the Bards). A fluent Welsh-speaker, he lives in Brynhoffnant, Ceredigion.