Wales Book of the Year Award 2026 Shortlist

A sequel to her T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Erato, Deryn Rees-Jones’ remarkable new collection sees her returning to ongoing preoccupations: the complexities of memory and memorialisation, desire and the body, and poetry’s place in a hostile world.

The book begins with a woman checking into Hôtel Amour, a space both real and imagined, in the heart of Paris. This is a hallucinatory city where surreal symbols loom large: the hotel’s pink neon sign, elephants, doubles, and lost pairings. A bloody heart lies in the street, books concertina into song, and everywhere is the ever-present noise of birds.

Playful and moving by turn, Hôtel Amour experiments with fragmented narrative and poetic form, creating a breathing space for a multilayered and powerful meditation on illness, love and time. Hôtel Amour’s fierce and formidable exploration of ‘the now’ and its many ghostly literary pasts, is the work of a poet at the height of her powers as she asks us to listen and explore our human capacity for transformation and for hope.

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Deryn Rees-Jones was born in Liverpool and educated in north Wales and London. She is the author of 7 collections of poetry including The Memory Tray (Seren Books, 1995) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has twice been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize with her collections Burying the Wren (Seren Books, 2012)and Erato (Seren Books, 2019) which were also Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She edited the influential anthology Modern Women Poets for Bloodaxe. She has received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and was picked as one of the top ten women poets of the decade in Mslexia magazine. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool where she co-directs the Centre for New and International Writing and edits the Pavilion Poetry Series for Liverpool University Press.

Laura Wainwright’s debut collection is a powerful exploration of resilience in the face of ecological and human crises. Here, new life emerges from darkness and turmoil, and flourishes despite it. These poems offer awe-inspiring observations of the natural world rooted in the language, landscapes and histories of Wales. Told with musicality and an artist’s eye for detail, The Storm’s Flora celebrates the earth’s vivid beauty with flair and ingenuity.

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Laura Wainwright was born in Cardiff and grew up in Newport, Gwent, where she still lives. She attended school in Newport, and Cardiff University where she attained a BA, MA and PhD in English Literature. Her PhD thesis focused on Anglophone Welsh literature and was later published as New Territories in Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing, 1930-1949 by the University of Wales Press. Laura has also published poetry pamphlets, Air and Armour (Green Bottle Press, 2021) – the outcome of a Literature Wales Writer’s Bursary – and Coedcernyw: among other things (Clutag Press, 2023). Thrall: Poems and Art, a collaboration with Robert Minhinnick featuring Laura’s poetry and artwork, was published in February 2025 by Seventh Quarry Press.

Equal parts commonplace book, instruction manual and cheerful vandalism, Fourth & Walnut is absurdly joyful, gathering together words from a wide range of favourite writers and artists, erasing some and fooling with others as variations on themes and tunes are tried out. Interludes on love and death deviate into a sequence promising an essay on reading and unpredictability, which is in turn distracted by counting snowdrops, shellacking cardboard boxes and the urge to take flight.

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Jeremy Over was born in Leeds in 1961. He now lives on a hill near Llanidloes in the middle of Wales. His poetry was first published in New Poetries II in 1999, and he has had four subsequent collections with Carcanet: A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (2001), Deceiving Wild Creatures (2009), Fur Coats in Tahiti (2019) and Fourth & Walnut (2025).

I felt at peace in the depth of darkness, listening to the slow clatter of single leaves falling. I was complete, both dissolved into the land and whole upon its surface.

Winner of the inaugural Ilse Schwepcke Prize 2025 for travel writing by women.

Join Ursula Martin on an epic 5,500-mile trek across Europe, walking and wild camping in remote landscapes. Along the way, she faces fear, exhaustion and solitude while discovering deeper connections with the world around her. Through her encounters with locals and fellow travellers, Ursula must confront her own limits and a longing for home. In this inspirational story of adventure, resilience and transformation, she navigates the balance between independence and community, learning that sometimes the toughest journey can be found within.

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Ursula Martin has focused her youth on travelling, in between periods of low paid work. She was born in Swansea, grew up in Derbyshire and lives in Newtown. She has a small overgrown garden where she plants seeds and forgets to harvest them. Her first book, One Woman Walks Wales, was published by Honno Press in 2018. To promote One Woman Walks Europe, she walked from bookshop to bookshop across Wales and then from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. She has walked 10,000 miles in three years.

Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write about his great-grandfather, Siegfried: an eccentric scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home.

The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally read the manuscript himself, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew.

Thus begins a mystery which stretches across the twentieth century and around the world, from Berlin to Ankara, New York, Glasgow and eventually London – a mystery about the production of something much more sinister than toothpaste. On the trail of one ‘jolly grandpa’ with a patchy psychiatric history and an encyclopaedic knowledge of poison gases, Joe Dunthorne is forced to confront the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family. Can we ever understand where we come from? Is every family in the end a work of fiction? And even if the truth can be found –will we be able to live with it?

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Joe Dunthorne was born and brought up in Swansea. He is the author of three novels and one collection of poetry, including Submarine (Hamish Hamilton, 2008), which has been translated into fifteen languages and made into an acclaimed film directed by  Richard Ayoade, and Wild Abandon, which won the 2012 Encore Award. Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance  is his first work of non-fiction. He lives in London.

What does ‘home’ mean? Is it where you come from, or is it somewhere that you have to create for yourself, building brick by brick on the ruins and treasures of everything that has gone before? In this compelling memoir, Gosia Buzzanca tells the story of a young woman who leaves Poland at the age of eighteen in search of a bigger life, hoping to leave the traumas of her teenage years behind her. After studying in England, she finds a rich new tapestry of experience awaiting her in Wales, with intertwined threads of love and literature, hope and despair. Motherhood brings new joys, but the pain of the past must be faced before this new life by the seaside can truly feel like home. With the fearless honesty of a poet, Gosia offers her account of an extraordinary ordinary life where every flavour is tasted, every moment lived to its fullest. This story of a lifelong quest for home will call to anyone who has ever felt lost or incomplete, and who yearns to find a place where they belong.

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Gosia Buzzanca was born in Poznań, Poland. She began publishing short stories in 2002, before moving to the UK in  2008. She earned a Creative Writing MA with distinction and was a recipient of the W&A Working-Class Writers’ Prize  in 2022. There She Goes, My Beautiful World is her first book. She now lives, works and writes in Barry, Wales.

From the award-winning author of The Dig and Cove, a collection of viscerally powerful short stories in which man is pitted against nature, against circumstance, and against himself.

A man heads into the snow to hunt down the bear that has been taking stock from farms in the valley. A father tries to make something go right for the son he no longer lives with. A partner is called to help when a cow’s labour goes horribly wrong. A fierce storm threatens to bring down a tree on powerlines over a family’s home.

Fear, vulnerability, tension and resolve course through these arresting and indelible stories from one of the finest British writers at work today.

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Cynan Jones won a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award 2007, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize 2014, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015 and the BBC National Short Story Award 2017. His work has appeared in more than twenty countries, on BBC Radio 4 and in Granta, Freeman’s, and the New Yorker. He is the author of The Dig (2014), Cove (2017) and Stillicide (2019), all published by Granta Publications.

A story of survival and humanity set in early 1900s New England. Miller explores themes of colonialism, disability, eugenics and rural life on the fringes of society. “A woman’s body is a machine specially designed for producing consequences.”

Winter closes in on a valley in northern New England where a violent history is about to repeat itself. The Allen family farm is nearly empty. Only Eddie, the youngest son, remains, living with his family’s ghosts near the woods he loves. In those woods he meets Jeanne Delaney, a girl he’s known all his life, now turning into a woman. This is not the first time that Eddie’s people have come into contact with Jeanne’s, though. Their families are already tied together by a violent past.

For readers of Where the Crawdads Sing, Cold Grace is a dark historical novel defined by its frozen landscape. Both revenge tragedy and coming of age story, it tells of an isolated community haunted by the ghost of its own violence.

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Meredith Miller is a fiction writer, editor and literary critic who lives in mid Wales. She has published four novels and numerous short stories, and was shortlisted for the Rhys Davies Prize in 2022. Booklist described Meredith’s work as ‘lyrical, character-driven fiction with a gritty edge’. Publisher’s Weekly have written that her ‘vivid, haunting writing is filled with prose gems’.

Meredith is a fluent speaker of Welsh as a second language. She owns a chapel in Bro Dyfi, which she is restoring and developing as a centre for Welsh language, literature and culture.

From a new voice in Welsh literature, an atmospheric and poignant story of a relationship between two small-town Valleys men during the late 1980s.

When two quiet men form a tentative connection neither knows where it might lead. M has inherited his family’s ironmongery business and B is younger by eleven years and can see no future in the place where he has grown up, but when M offers him a job and lodgings, he accepts. As the two men work side by side in the shop, they also begin a life together in their one shared room above – the kind of life they never imagined possible and that risks everything if their public performance were to slip.

Unfolding in south Wales against the backdrop of Section 28, the age of consent debate and the HIV and AIDS crisis, this is a tender and resonant love story, and a powerful debut.

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Anthony Shapland grew up in Bargoed, south Wales. He is a writer and artist, and founder of g39, an artist-led space in Cardiff. His short story ‘Foolscap’ was shortlisted for the Rhys Davies Short Story Competition and he was selected for the Hay Writers at Work programme in 2023. This is his debut.

Apricot Jones dreams of escape; best friend Charlie will always be there to clean up after her. A postcard to the love-hate relationship between best friends, and with your hometown.  

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Zillah Bethell was born in Papua New Guinea, spent her childhood barefoot playing in the jungle, and didn’t own a pair of shoes until she came to the UK when she was eight. She read English at Wadham College, Oxford and lives in south Wales with her family. Zillah has published three adult novels on subjects ranging from depression to the Paris communes and artist Gwen John. Her work for children includes four middle-grade novels: A Whisper of Horses (Piccadilly Press, 2016), The Extraordinary Colours of Auden Dare (Hot Key, 2017), The Shark Caller (Usborne, 2021, shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award, and Children and Young People Award Winner, Wales Book of the Year 2022) and The Song Walker (Usborne, 2023)shortlisted for the Yoto Carnegie Medal 2024.

Ten-year-old Rhys really loves dogs. When he finds a lost black Labrador with big conker eyes and ears like soft velvet, he can’t quite believe his luck. Nobody comes forward to claim Worthington, giving Rhys the perfect opportunity to prove he’s a good owner. But when Rhys moves to London to live with his estranged dad who hates dogs, Rhys decides to keep Worthington secret.

Struggling to connect with his dad in a new city, Rhys takes comfort in Worthington. But he soon discovers that looking after a secret dog is anything but easy, and he knows that before long he’ll have to confront his fears and find a way to tell Dad…

Phenomenally moving and beautifully written, My Dog shows us that accepting the present doesn’t mean forgetting the past – in a story that will live with you for ever.

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Olivia Wakeford writes a lot about grief, which really means she writes about love. And dogs: she believes every story should have a dog in it! Olivia has worked in film and television, been a scriptwriter, dog-walker, PA and more, but her favourite job is writing novels for children. Olivia graduated with distinction from the MA in Writing for Children at Bath Spa University, she can ride a unicycle (badly) and is addicted to salt and vinegar crisps. She was born in Wales and now lives in London with her husband and their socially awkward Labrador, Obi. My Dog is her debut novel.

Ceridwen Parry has run away with the fairies. But this is not her story.

For Sabrina Parry, the world is tough, cruel and practical. With her father in prison, her aims in life are: 1. hold onto her job, 2. hold her tongue and 3. set up her sister Ceridwen with a man rich enough to look after her.

Ceridwen is lovely, romantic, timid – everything that Sabrina isn’t. But then Ceridwen vanishes into the eerie woods leaving only an iron ring behind and Sabrina is drawn into a beautiful but decaying world of fairies and monsters of old. And when an annoyingly handsome fairy prince offers her a dangerous deal, Sabrina is forced to put her own freedom at risk to save her sister.

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Anna Fiteni is a Welsh writer with a passion for Welsh mythology and a truly exquisite storyteller just bursting with ideas and excitement. From Cardiff, she studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick, before going on to the University of Oxford to complete a PGCE. When not writing, Anna enjoys travelling, fashion history, and daydreaming about writing. The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire is her debut novel.

Poetry Award – Supported by Parry Davies Clwyd-Jones & Lloyd 
Trochi -Cerddi Carwyn Eckley, Carwyn Eckley (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch)  

Mae, Mererid Hopwood (Cyhoeddiadau Barddas)  

Chwarter Eiliad, Jo Heyde (Cyhoeddiadau Barddas) 

Fiction Award  - Sponsored by HSJ Accountants 
Dau, Bethan Nantcyll (Gwasg y Bwthyn)  

Hiraeth Neifion, Simon Chandler (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch)  

Tri, Sonia Edwards (Gwasg y Bwthyn) 

Creative Non-fiction – Sponsored by Stori Cymru
 Lobsgows – Cariad y Cymry at Fwyd, Ruth Richards (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch)  

Y Cyfan a Fu Rhyngom Ni – Ar Lwybrau ‘Atgof’ Prosser Rhys,  Iestyn Tyne (Gwasg y Bwthyn)  

Ynysoedd Gobaith – Mentrau a Syniadau Iwtopaidd yng Nghymru’r Ugeinfed Ganrif, Llion Wigley (Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru) 

Children & Young People Award – Supported by Cronfa Elw Park-Jones

Anfarwol, Rebecca Roberts (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch)

Gerwyn Gwrthod a’r Llyfr Does Neb yn Cael Ei Ddarllen,  Siôn Tomos Owen (Atebol)

Y Cae Ras, Manon Steffan Ros (Y Lolfa)