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Fflur Dafydd taking part in Washington Meets Wales, c. Academi/ Dai Baker

Fflur Dafydd was announced the first winner of the Oxfam Emerging Writer of the Year Award at the Guardian Hay Festival. During a special ceremony at the Sky Arts Dinner on Saturday 23 May, Peter Florence, director of the festival, declared that Dafydd’s novel Twenty Thousand Saints, a literary thriller set on Bardsey island, was the best novel he’d read in the past ten years, and that she was one of the most exciting young fiction writers to emerge in recent years. This is Dafydd’s first work of fiction in English, and she was awarded was the Prose Medal at the National Eisteddfod in 2006 for her Welsh language novel Atyniad.

David McCullough, Director of Oxfam said “We are very happy to work in partnership with the Hay Festival this year and congratulate Fflur Dafydd on being the first winner of our Emerging Writer of the Year Award.”

As part of her prize, she was presented with a very rare first edition hardback copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, donated by Oxfam’s books product development manager, Graham Draisey.

Fflur also took part in two successful events at the Guardian Hay Festival, reading with Dylan Thomas Prize Winner Nam Le, and the writer and broadcaster Jon Gower. Her novel will now be promoted worldwide by the Hay Festival, and will also be downloadable in full from the Hay Festival Website.

Festival Director Peter Florence’s longstanding love of Fflur’s writing was hinted at in the Western Mail just prior to the prize’s adjudication, when he name-checked her alongside Sarah Waters, Kate Atkinson and Zoe Heller as belonging to "the blossoming and triumphs of a whole new generation of young women writers."

She will now embark on a reading tour to promote Twenty Thousand Saints, appearing at the Latitude Festival, Suffolk and the Writers’ Reunion in Finland. Twenty Thousand Saints is published by Alcemi Press.