Judges

2012 Wales Book of the Year Judges

English Language Judging Panel 

Chair:
Dr Spencer Jordan

Spencer teaches creative writing and digital media at Cardiff Metropolitan University. His novel, Journeys in the Dead Season, was published by Macmillan in 2005. Over the years he’s been a computer programmer, fishkeeper and researcher, before coming to academia. His PhD was undertaken at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he undertook a prosopographical analysis of over 2,000 city elites. He is currently director for MA Humanities programmes in the Cardiff School of Education. He is particularly interested in short stories and historical fiction, as well as the use of digital media within the humanities disciplines. When not teaching he likes nothing more than striding out across the Black Mountains, preferably within sight of the beautiful Vale of Ewyas and a decent hostelry or two.

Trezza Azzopardi

Trezza Azzopardi was born and grew up in Cardiff. She has an MA in Film Studies from The University of Derby, and in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She taught at South East Derbyshire College for ten years before becoming a writer, and has since returned to UEA as a lecturer in Creative Writing. She has written four novels: her first, The Hiding Place, won the 2001 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Winterton Blue, her third novel, was longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year in 2008. Her latest novel, The Song House, has been serialized on BBC Radio 4.
She also writes short stories, which have been widely anthologized, essays, and occasional pieces for radio. Her work has been translated into twenty languages.
She lives in Norwich.
 

Dr Sam Adams

Sam Adams – poet, novelist, essayist, editor, critic and researcher, was educated at Tonyrefail Grammar School and the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is a former editor of Poetry Wales, and former Chairman of the English Language Section of Yr Academi Gymreig. Since the 1970s his poems have been appearing in the major English-language magazines published in Wales, in England and the USA. The latest of his three books of poems, Missed Chances (Y Lolfa), came out in 2007. His work as editor includes both the Collected Short Stories and Collected Poems of Roland Mathias for UWP. He is the author of three monographs in the Writers of Wales series, and has contributed to collections of scholarly essays including the Gwent County History, the Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English, and Comparative Criticism(CUP). For more than a decade his ‘Letter from Wales’ has appeared regularly in the Carcanet Press magazine PN Review. His novel Prichard’s Nose was published by Y Lolfa in 2010. For several years he served on the committee that judges the Roland Mathias Prize. Dr Adams comes from Gilfach Goch and lives in Caerleon.

The judges on the Welsh-Language Juding Panel are Dr Jason Walford Davies, Kate Woodward and Bethan Mair Hughes. Click here to read more about the Welsh panel judges.