Sophie Buchaillard is a lover of books, nature, and coffee, raised at the confluence of cultural traditions she didn’t fully understand growing up. At eighteen, she left Paris to travel, settling five years later in south Wales where she has lived almost 25 years. She writes contemporary fiction inspired by movement and her own experience as a migrant, to reflect on the anxieties of our age. Her debut novel This Is Not Who We Are (Seren Books) was shortlisted for the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award and the Wales Book of the Year 2023.
Sophie is a Hay Writer at Work 2023 and a Translation Board Member for The Other Side of Hope Magazine, an Arts Council England funded magazine showcasing the writing of refugees and migrants.
Sophie also contributed to the travel writing collection edited by Steven Lovatt: An Open Door: New Travel Writing for A Precarious Century (Parthian, 2022). Her short stories and essays have appeared in a wide array of literary magazines and newspapers, including ByLine Times, Wales Arts Review, Murmurations Magazine, the Other Side of Hope, Together and Apart (Square Wheel Press) and the ecological magazine Modron. Her second novel, Assimilation (Honno) is due out February 2024.
A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Sophie is passionate about empowering others to write. She teaches creative writing at Cardiff University and facilitates workshops in partnership with libraries, charities and a wide array of organisations. Get in touch!
Her PhD in Creative and Critical Writing focused on the role inclusive travel writing can play in reinventing what we mean by identity, in a world faced with global challenges. Originally trained as a political scientist, she co-authored Talented Women for a Successful Wales, a report making recommendations to the Welsh Government on improving gender parity in business and education. She continues to campaign on the issues of pollution and human rights.
