Wales Book of the Year Award 2025 Shortlist

The language in Rhian Elizabeth’s poetry feels instinctual: the poems in Girls etc pulse and ripple with energy, their rhythms are perfectly pitched. Elizabeth writes of personal experience with an intensity and sharpness that challenges you to look closely. Girls etc showcases a defiance, alongside the beauty and vulnerability here, which resonates long after the last page is turned. Rhian Elizabeth brings a breath of fresh air to contemporary poetry. 

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Rhian Elizabeth was born in 1988 in the Rhondda Valley, South Wales. She is a Hay Festival Writer at Work and Writer in Residence at the Coracle International Literary Festival in Tranås, Sweden. She is currently at night school studying to be a counsellor. 

The poems in Natalie Ann Holborow’s Little Universe are an exploration of tumultuous human emotions and nature’s ever-present rhythms. Lives bustle within a busy hospital’s walls, humming against the Gower landscape that stretches beyond its windows. The tiny worlds of a wide cast unfold as they deal with their own emergencies, losses, recoveries, hopes and histories.  

Medical students stride the length of the corridor in rubber shoes, scars running the lengths of their lives. A janitor is crying in the Gents’, watching the flowers at the hospital entrance shrug themselves back into earth. The biblical Lilith offers knowledge from one woman to the other. And somewhere in the distance, a bunker dissolves into gold upon Pennard’s shoulder, dusk folding to sleep on Rhossili.  

The characters in this book are all bound by the undying pulse of existence ‒ yet their stories serve as a reminder that despite these stark contrasts, life persists. 

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Natalie Ann Holborow is a winner of the Terry Hetherington Award and the Robin Reeves Prize and has been shortlisted and commended for the Bridport Prize, the National Poetry Competition, the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Cursed Murphy Spoken Word Award among others. She is the author of the poetry collections And Suddenly You Find Yourself, Small – both listed as Best Poetry Collections of the Year by Wales Arts Review – and, with Mari Ellis Dunning, the collaborative poetry pamphlet The Wrong Side of the Looking Glass. Little Universe is her third full collection. Natalie lives in Swansea, is a proud patron of local charity The Leon Heart Fund and runs marathons to raise funds.  

Portrait of a Young Girl Falling is unapologetic in its feminist exploration of desire, consent, identity, and gendered experience. Katrina Moinet’s poems tug at violences and tensions present in language, the way it constructs, shapes, limits, or opens up our conception of these things. Stunning and experimental, this compact debut collection is brimming with fresh strategies of association, productive or interrogative ambiguities, multiplicities of meaning that make space for new ways of thinking. 

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Katrina Moinet comes from Ynys Môn. Katrina won Globe Soup’s Short Story and 24-hour Flash Fiction competitions and is a Bournemouth Writing Festival prize winner. Best-of-the-Net nominee, their work has been published in Mslexia, Hedgehog, Raw Lit, Black Iris, Poetry Wales, Ffosfforws, Wild North Wales, Nation.Cymru, on display in Pontio and Venue Cymru, and placed in international competitions. Katrina holds a master’s in creative writing with distinction from Bangor University and hosts Blue Sky Versify. Hedgehog Press will publish Katrina’s second, prize-winning pamphlet in 2025. Portrait of a Young Girl Falling is their debut.

In Tir – the Welsh word for ‘land’ – writer and naturalist Carwyn Graves takes us on a tour of seven key elements of the Welsh landscape, such as the ffridd, or mountainside pasture, and the rhos, or moorland. By diving deep into the history and ecology of each of these landscapes, we discover that the land of Wales, in all its beautiful variety, is at base just as much a human cultural creation as a natural phenomenon: its raw materials evolved alongside the humans that have lived here since the ice receded. In our modern era of climate concerns and polarised debates on land use, diet and more, it matters that we understand the world we are in and the roads we travelled to get here. By exploring each of these key landscapes and meeting the people who live, work and farm in them, Tir offers hope for a better future; one with stunningly beautiful, richly biodiverse landscapes that are ten times richer in wildlife than they currently are, and still full of humans working the land. 

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Carwyn Graves is an author, public speaker, gardener and naturalist from Wales. His previous titles are Apples of Wales and Welsh Food Stories, which was described by Sheila Dillon of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme as ‘one of the best food books of 2022’. 

In this extraordinary memoir, Gwyneth Lewis, the inaugural National Poet of Wales, recounts her toxic upbringing at the hands of her controlling, coercive mother. It is a book that Gwyneth has been preparing to write all her life, in diaries that she’s kept since childhood. In these journals, she interrogates the emotionally abusive mother/daughter relationship, in great pain but determined to find a way through. The result is a book that Gwyneth co-writes with her younger self, an unexpected and life-saving dialogue through time. Metaphors of haunting intensity help her confront what happened to her; quotations from art and literature help to guide and steady her. Nightshade Mother is a book about the power of art, language and, ultimately, about homecoming after a lifetime of exile from herself. It is a profoundly moving and beautiful work; questing, forgiving and loving in its approach. 

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All Gwyneth Lewis ever wanted to be was a writer. Brought up Welsh-speaking in Cardiff, she studied English and spent time in America. She was Wales’s first National Poet and composed the six-foot-high words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre. Her other non-fiction books are Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage. She has published nine books of poetry, the latest being Sparrow Tree. 

For thousands of years, humans have been the architects of the natural world. Our activities have permanently altered the environment – for good and for bad. In Nature’s Ghosts, award-winning journalist Sophie Yeo examines how the planet would have looked before humans scrubbed away its diversity: from landscapes carved out by megafauna to the primeval forests that emerged following the last Ice Age, and from the eagle-haunted skies of the Dark Ages to the flower-decked farms of more recent centuries. Uncovering the stories of the people who have helped to shape the landscape, she seeks out their footprints even where it seems there are none to be found. And she explores the timeworn knowledge that can help to fix our broken relationship with the earth. Along the way, Sophie encounters the environmental detectives – archaeological, cultural and ecological – reconstructing, in stunning detail, the landscapes we have lost. Today, the natural world is more vulnerable than ever; the footprints of humanity heavier than they have ever been. But, as this urgent book argues, from the ghosts of the past, we may learn how to build a more wild and ancient future. 

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Sophie Yeo is a writer and journalist based in Durham, England. She has written about nature and climate change for publications including the Washington Post, the Guardian and BBC Future. She is also the founder and editor of Inkcap Journal, a publication focusing on conservation in Britain, which won the Press Gazette Newsletter of the Year award in 2022. Her first book, Nature’s Ghosts, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation in 2024.

Forester Gethin Thomas is struggling to make ends meet in his rural hometown in North Wales. Bright, charming, but unambitious, the thing that keeps him going is Tŷy Gwydr, a beautiful lakeside house that he keeps an eye on for absent English owners. The house has been empty for so long he’s come to think of it as his own.
 
That is until the owners decide to sell, sending Geth into freefall. And when he discovers that Olwen, his first love who left him and their small town for a new life in London, has returned to North Wales with her husband, Geth and Olwen will find themselves pulled back into the past and what could have been – or still could be.

But soon mysterious messages start arriving at the house, and they must question whether this is the love story they thought it was, or whether there might be something altogether more sinister lurking beneath the surface. 

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Francesca Reece is a writer from North Wales. Her debut novel, Voyeur, was published by Tinder Press in 2021. She was the 2019 recipient of the Desperate Literature Prize, and has had work featured in The London Magazine, Banshee, and Elle UK. She is now based in London. 

For all her life, idealistic 20-year-old bookworm Magdalena Arber has been split down the middle: veering wildly between fidelity to indoctrinated Nazi beliefs, and her father’s humanist values. Then comes the summons–the Nazi War Labour Service is conscripting her into a teaching position in East Prussia. Magda is elated. It’s a release from the cosy cage of childhood, and a chance to form young minds. She enters a lush rural world of forests, lakes, and meadows where order prevails. Yet there are monstrous hands out to shape the whole continuum of earthly creatures. The Gestapo are a lurking darkness. There is bombing further East, and news of a moving Russian front. Will Alt Schönbek burn as well? Can Magda survive? 

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Stevie Davies is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University. She has published widely in the fields of fiction, literary criticism, biography and popular history. Her novel The Web of Belonging (1997) was adapted as a Channel 4 television film. Her novel The Element of Water (2001) was long-listed for the Booker and Orange Prizes and won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year in 2002. Stevie has three children who are the joy of her life. She is a cyclist and sea-swimmer. 

1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep. Unaware of the stranger’s intentions, Ivar takes him into his home, and in spite of the two men having no common language, a fragile bond begins to form between them. Meanwhile on the mainland, John’s wife Mary anxiously awaits news of his mission.

Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies’s intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form. 

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Carys Davies is the author of two novels, The Mission House (Granta, 2020) and West (Granta, 2018), which won the Wales Book of the Year Fiction award, was Runner-Up for the Society of Author’s McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her short stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and have won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s V S Pritchett Prize, and a Northern Writers’ Award. Davies’ second collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award 2015. 

Starting high school was never going to be easy for Mo, but a fall out with her so-called ʻfriendsʼ leaves her lonelier than ever. Then she finds Onyx. Exploring an abandoned Victorian asylum may seem a weird way to develop a friendship, but then Mo has always found she does things a bit differently. Together they help each other accept their own differences even when others struggle to do the same. Determined to keep the pair apart, Onyxʼs dad actions force them back to the secrecy of Denham asylum. On Halloween night, with the old building due for demolition, the two friends enter for the last time… 

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Chloë Heuch was born in Taunton and lives near Pwllheli on the North Wales coast with her partner, two children, her psychopath cat and the dog.She has a Creative Writing MA from Lancaster University and is a member of SCBWI. Her novel Too Dark to See was published by Firefly in 2020. She currently divides her time between her children, her writing and teaching teenagers. 

Is Marcus’s fate decided by his family? Or can he stand up for himself to become the person he really wants to be? 

Marcus has one brother in a youth offender centre and the other is working with their dad on plans for their next theft. Everyone assumes Marcus will follow in their footsteps, but he has other ideas, different hopes. 

When a mysterious accident lands a man in hospital, it confirms what everyone in their community expects and Marcus gets the blame. He feels trapped. Only new girl Emma – with her peace protest banners and political badges – questions this story. Can they work together to clear his name – and help Marcus become the person he really wants to be? 

An exciting and moving story about questioning your loyalties, from the acclaimed author of The Valley of Lost Secrets. Perfect for readers of 10+ who love Phil Earle, Frank Cottrell-Boyce or Brian Conaghan. 

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Lesley Parr is the author of three novels for children. Her debut, The Valley of Lost Secrets, was published in 2021 and was both a Waterstones Book of the Month and longlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal. It won the Tir na n-Og Award, the King’s School Chester Book Award and the North Somerset Teachers’ Book Award, as well as being shortlisted for many others. Lesley grew up in South Wales and now lives in England with her husband. She shares her time between writing stories, teaching at a primary school and tutoring adults. Apart from books, rugby union is her favourite thing in the world, especially if Wales is winning. 

In this debut poetry collection for children Sarah takes the reader on a vibrant journey based on her acute observations of everyday life and language. Loosely arranged across a school year – September through Halloween, Christmas, Spring, Summer holidays, a new school year/just before secondary – Sarah’s witty observations, juxtapositions, and playful use of language pervade every poem and bring a vivid charm and freshness to every page.  This debut collection heralds the emergence of a strikingly new and inventive voice in children’s poetry. 

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Sarah Ziman was born and grew up in the South Wales valleys and is STILL learning Welsh. She wrote her first picture book at the age of 6, having been heavily influenced by the ‘Happy Families’ series by Allan Ahlberg, and discovered poetry when her dad bought her a copy of ‘Please Mrs Butler’ (also by Allan Ahlberg). She had a poem published in a book when she was 11, followed by one which travelled around as a poster on the London Underground when she was 13. She then had a little break of about 30 years, which she mostly spent lazing about eating crisps. She won the YorkMix Poems for Children Competition in 2021, has been highly commended for the Caterpillar Poetry Prize three times, and her poems can be found in magazines and anthologies worldwide. ‘Why Did My Brain Make Me Say It?’ is her first solo collection for children. 

Poetry Award
Rhuo ei distawrwydd hi, Meleri Davies (Cyhoeddiadau’r Stamp)
Pethau sy’n Digwydd, Siôn Tomos Owen (Barddas)
O’r Rhuddin, Sioned Erin Hughes (Y Lolfa)

Creative Non-Fiction
Oedolyn (ish!), Melanie Owen (Y Lolfa)
Camu, Iola Ynyr (Y Lolfa)
Casglu Llwch, Georgia Ruth (Y Lolfa)

Fiction Award (Sponsored by HSJ Accountants)
Nelan a Bo, Angharad Price (Y Lolfa)
Madws, Sioned Wyn Roberts (Gwasg y Bwthyn)
V a Fo, Gwenno Gwilym (Gwasg y Bwthyn)

Children and Young People Award (Supported by Cronfa Elw Park-Jones)
Cymru. Balch. Ifanc., Golygwyd gan Llŷr Titus a Megan Angharad Hunter (Rily Publications)
Arwana Swtan a’r Sgodyn Od, Angie Roberts a Dyfan Roberts (Gwasg y Bwthyn)
Rhedyn,  Myrddin ap Dafydd (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch)