HAY FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES PARTICIPANTS FOR ITS WRITERS AT WORK 2023 PROGRAMME FOR EMERGING WELSH TALENT 

Hay Festival has today announced the participants of this year’s Writers at Work, a creative development programme for emerging Welsh talent at Hay Festival 2023 (25 May–4 June) with the support of Literature Wales, funded by Arts Council of Wales.

Offering a fully-programmed week of creative development opportunities, Writers at Work allows the selected writers to engage in the main Festival events, to attend masterclasses and workshops with publishers, agents and, crucially, with established international artists. 

Open to writers working in English and Welsh across genres – fiction, non-fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry ¬– this year’s 10 successful applicants are:

• Connor Allen
• Sophie Buchaillard 
• Brennig Davies 
• Nia Davies
• Gwenllian Ellis
• Louise Mumford
• Taz Rahman
• Francesca Reece
• Anthony Shapland
• Emma Smith-Barton

Writers at Work is a Hay Festival project supported by Literature Wales – the national company for the development of literature – and run by writer Tiffany Murray. Participants to date have achieved a spread of award wins and shortlistings, including the International Dylan Thomas Prize, Wales Book of the Year, The New Welsh Writing Award, the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, Wales Media Award, Welsh Rising Star Award, and Creative Wales Award.

Established in 2016 to nurture Welsh talent writing in both languages, Writers at Work was paused during the Covid-19 pandemic. 2023 will mark its fifth year.  

Hay Festival CEO Julie Finch said: “Hay Festival is a convener of writers, readers and – crucially – creative opportunities. As one of Wales’ largest cultural institutions we are proud of our Welsh roots and take our responsibility to the cultural landscape of Wales seriously. We are delighted to bring 10 invigorating Writers at Work to this year’s festival, with a brand new format to meet the challenges Wales’ emerging creatives face today, guarding and growing our creative impact for the future.”

Literature Wales Artistic Director Leusa Llewelyn said: “It’s a pleasure to be working with Hay Festival again on this important writer development programme. It has nurtured and inspired so many great Welsh writers who are now firmly established within our literary culture. Beyond developing the skills and knowledge of individual writers, it brings together a magical mix of creative minds from all parts of the country. Previous programmes have led to the creation of new networks and collaborations that have played an important part in transforming Wales’ literature into a more representative, enterprising and forward-thinking artform.”

Writer and former participant Darren Chetty said: “Being part of Writers at Work 2019 was a superb experience. I got to hear from leading writers and be part of a supportive community of Welsh writers. Three of us who met as Writers at Work went on to co-edit Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales.”

Hay Festival is the world’s leading festival of ideas, bringing readers and writers together in sustainable events to inspire, examine and entertain on the edge of the Brecon Beacons/Bannau Brycheiniog National Park 

This year’s programme launches the best new fiction and non-fiction, while offering insights and debate around significant global issues. Award-winning writers, policy makers, pioneers and innovators take part from around the world, offering big thinking and bold ideas.

Guests include writers Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, Eleanor Catton, Max Porter, Jonathan Coe, Leïla Slimani, Fflur Dafydd, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Alys Conran, Richard Ford, Jojo Moyes, Horatio Clare, Natalie Haynes, Richard Osman, Douglas Stuart, Elif Shafak, Katherine May; poets Simon Armitage, Owen Sheers, Carol Ann Duffy, Rufus Mufasa and Michael Rosen; YA star Alice Oseman; children’s heroes Cressida Cowell, Jacqueline Wilson, Julia Donaldson, Connor Allen; music icons Stormzy, Dua Lipa, The Proclaimers, Levellers,  Judi Jackson, Baaba Maal, Zhadan and the Dogs; comedians Dara Ó Briain, Tom Allen, Jason Byrne, Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Josie Long, Isy Suttie, Mark Steel; stars of stage and screen Helena Bonham Carter, Richard E. Grant, Olivia Williams, Samuel West; politicians and policy makers Sadiq Khan, chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance; journalists George Monbiot, Alastair Campbell, Marina Hyde, Gary Younge, Lyse Doucet; activist Munroe Bergdorf; economist Mariana Mazzucato; historians Lucy Worsley, Simon Schama, Irene Vallejo; artist Tracey Emin; foodies Mary Berry, Jack Monroe, Ruth Rogers, Andi Oliver and Prue Leith; Thinkers in Residence Laura Bates, Will Gompertz, David Olusoga, Charlotte Williams; and many more. 

Providing exciting new platforms to discover fresh ideas, Hay Festival invites audiences to imagine the world as it is and as it might be. It is a catalyst for change and action, open and accessible to all.

Tickets are on sale now at hayfestival.org/wales or on 01497 822 629. 

Writers at Work biographies:

Connor Allen

Connor Allen is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and the Children’s Laureate Wales (2021-2023). He has written for BBC Wales, BBC Radio 4, Wales Millennium Centre, Sherman Theatre, Dirty Protest, and others, and is a former member of the BBC Wales Welsh Voices and The Welsh Royal Court writing groups. His work is heavily inspired by elements of his own life including grief, love, masculinity, identity and ethnicity.

An actor graduate from University of Wales Trinity Saint David, he wrote and performed in his acclaimed debut show The Making of a Monster at the Wales Millennium Centre in 2022 (playtext published by Aurora Metro Books), which won the 2023 Imison Award at the BBC Audio Drama Awards. In 2021, he won the Rising Star Wales Award, and was a Jerwood Live Work Fund recipient. His debut poetry collections Dominoes (for general audiences) and Miracles (for children) were published in 2023 by Lucent Dreaming.

He is Associate Artist of his hometown theatre The Riverfront in Newport.

Sophie Buchaillard 

Sophie Buchaillard is the author of This Is not who we Are (Seren Books, 2022). Her short stories and essays have appeared in an array of literary magazines and newspapers, including The ByLine Times, Wales Arts Review, Murmurations Magazine, and Modron Magazine. Sophie also contributed to the collections An Open Door: New Travel Writing for a Precarious Century (Parthian, 2022), and Anthology 1: Together and Apart (Square Wheel Press, 2020). A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Sophie is passionate about empowering others to write. She splits her time between writing and teaching creative writing at Cardiff University and in the community and is a Translation Board Member for the refugees and migrants magazine The Other Side of Hope. Sophie holds an MA in Creative and Critical Writing (Cardiff University, 2021) and is in the later stages of her PhD. She writes about identity, movement and migration. Find out more @growriter and www.sophiebuchaillard.com 

Brennig Davies 

Brennig Davies is a writer from the Vale of Glamorgan. He was the winner of the inaugural BBC Young Writers Award in 2015 and the Crown at the Urdd Eisteddfod 2019, and was shortlisted for the Rhys Davies Short Story Prize 2021. His work has appeared in Poetry Wales, The Cardiff Review and various anthologies, and he was the creative editor of Deffro (Urdd Gobaith Cymru, 2021).

Nia Davies

Nia Davies is a poet experimenting with embodied practice and performance. She is also a writer, researcher, performer, curator and editor. In 2021, Nia was awarded a doctorate for research into poetry and ritual at the University of Salford. Her first book-length collection of poems All Fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was shortlisted for the Roland Matthias Prize for Poetry in the Wales Book of the Year awards (2018) and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for First Collection (2019). She was editor of Poetry Wales (2014–2019) and has published several pamphlets and collaborative publications and performed in intermedia projects. Nia has also worked on international literary and translation projects and has performed, collaborated and curated around the world. She lives in Swansea/Abertawe where she is part of the curatorial group running the the Nawr series of experimental music and arts events. Her second collection will be published by Bloodaxe in 2024. 

Gwenllian Ellis

Originally from Pwllheli on the Llŷn Peninsula, Gwenllian Ellis currently lives in Kilburn, London. She published her popular first book Sgen I’m Syniad: Snogs, Secs, Sens in September 2022 with Y Lolfa. Part memoir, part social commentary, the collection follows the life of the author as she deals with the trials and tribulations of growing up and navigating her way through the world. The book has gained equal amounts of praise and notoriety for its open and frank exploration of growing up, diet culture, social media sex, dating, female friendships and what it means to be a young woman in the 21st century. 

Previously she had a column in Welsh language women’s magazine, Cara, in which she wrote about her personal experiences of modern dating. Since 2017, she has also worked with online platform, Hansh, and Cwmni Fran Wen theatre company as a freelance creative consultant and writer. Her play, In Luna, won second prize in the National Eisteddfod’s Drama Medal competition in 2018.

Louise Mumford

Louise Mumford was born and still lives in South Wales and had a previous career as a secondary school teacher. Her debut book, Sleepless, a “frighteningly inventive” speculative thriller inspired by her own experience of insomnia, was published by HQ in December 2020. It has reached the overall Top 50 UK Kindle Chart and was the Karin Slaughter July 2021 Killer Read in UK Asda stores nationwide. It has been recently published in Canada. Her latest thriller, The Safe House, was released in May 2022 and her next book The Hotel, out in June 2023, is set on the coast of West Wales. She is co-chair of Crime Cymru, a co-operative of crime fiction writers with a connection to Wales and she is part of the team who brought Wales’ first international crime fiction festival, Gŵyl Crime Cymru Festival, to Aberystwyth in April 2023, with sponsors and partners including the Welsh Government, Literature Wales and Waterstones. She can be found on Twitter @Louise_Mumford or at her website www.louisemumfordauthor.com.

Taz Rahman

Taz Rahman’s first poetry collection is out in February 2024 from Seren Books. He was shortlisted for the 2022 Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize and has been published in Poetry Wales, Bad Lilies, South Bank Poetry, Anthropocene, Honest Ulsterman, Planet, Barddas, Abridged Magazine, Propel and in various anthologies. He is in the editorial team for the climate emergency literary magazine Modron and also serves as the committee chair of Poetry Wales. He founded Wales’ first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet in 2019 to increase visibility of Welsh poets.

Francesca Reece 

Francesca Reece is a writer from North Wales. Her debut novel, Voyeur, was published by Tinder Press in 2021, and has been translated into German and Polish. She was the 2019 recipient of the Desperate Literature Prize, and has had work featured in The London Magazine, Banshee and Elle UK. After several years spent living in Paris, she is currently based in London, where she is working on her second novel, out next year.

Anthony Shapland

Anthony Shapland grew up in Bargoed in the Rhymney Valley. His work, as a writer, artist and filmmaker, blends documentary and fiction, building on his sense that the world is constructed in the same way as a film set – constantly evolving and temporary. His childhood was a time of massive upheaval and change. In parallel, coming out as gay was complex in a world that was only just shifting its moral and legal attitudes, making blending-in a survival strategy. Alongside writing and exhibiting, he is co-founder of g39, an artist-led space in Cardiff, where he works. He was part of the Representing Wales 2022 cohort on a support programme run by Literature Wales with mentoring support from Cynan Jones. Prior to that he took part in a short fiction course with Curtis Brown Creative, and a month-long programme with Moniack Mohr. In 2022 he was shortlisted for the Rhys Davies award for his short story, Foolscap, available in the anthology Cree, published by Parthian. He is currently working on a creative non-fiction essay with Inclusive Journalism and Seren, to be published in the anthology Cymru & I this year and is working on a short-form novella.

Emma Smith-Barton

Emma Smith-Barton is an author, teacher and creative writing mentor from South Wales. Growing up between cultures has heavily influenced her writing and she is especially interested in exploring themes of identity and belonging. Her debut YA novel, The Million Pieces of Neena Gill, was published by Penguin Random House and shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Award, the Branford Boase Award and the Romantic Novelists’ Association Debut Romantic Novel Award. She has a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Warwick and a Creative Writing MA from Bath Spa University.