Award winning writing at the London Welsh

Three authors shortlisted for the English-language fiction category of the Wales Book of the Year 2022 award will appear at the London Welsh Centre on Monday 5th December at 7pm to read and discuss their work.

The authors are Rhiannon Lewis, author of I Am the Mask Maker, Sian Hughes, author of Pain Sluts, and Nadifa Mohamed, whose novel, The Fortune Men, won both the fiction category and Wales Book of the Year award. The Fortune Men was also shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and Costa Novel of the Year.

The evening will be chaired by Andy Welch, journalist, author, and Assistant Production Manager at Guardian News and Media, who was a Wales Book of the Year judge.

Rhiannon Lewis

Rhiannon Lewis was born in Cardigan, West Wales and grew up on a small farm near the coast. In March 2018, her debut novel, My Beautiful Imperial, was listed by the Walter Scott Prize Academy as one of its recommended historical novels.

In 2019, her novella, The Significance of Swans, was runner-up in the New Welsh Writing Awards.

In September 2020, her short story ‘Piano Solo’ won the William Faulkner Literary Contest in New Albany, Mississippi, making her the first British author to win that contest.

Sian Hughes

Sian Hughes lives in Cardiff with her husband, three teenagers, and a menagerie of wayward animals. In 2019, after completing an MA in Creative Writing with the Open University, for which she gained a Distinction, she began writing short stories in earnest.

Several of her published stories have been adapted for film and TV.

An adaptation of her story, Consumed, was premiered in 2021 at the Glasgow Short Film Festival and has since won Best Fiction Short at the RVK Feminist Film Festival and Best Foreign Film at the Copenhagen Short Film Festival.

Pain Sluts is her debut collection of short stories.

Nadifa Mohamed

Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa, Somaliland, in 1981 and moved to Britain at the age of four.

Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, won the Betty Trask Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN Open Book Award.

Her second novel, Orchard of Lost Souls, won a Somerset Maughan Award and the Prix Alvert Bernard.

Nadifa Mohamed was selected for the Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The Fortune Men was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and Costa Novel of the Year. Nadifa Mohamed lives in London.

Andy Welch is a Welsh journalist and broadcaster, now residing in London.

He works for the Guardian, where he is an editor on ‘The long read’. He has produced podcasts, worked for NME and BBC 6 Music, and taught cultural theory at numerous universities.

He recently contributed an essay to Welsh (Plural); Essays on the future of Wales, about learning to love the accent he grew up with during his childhood in Rhyl.

The event will start at 7pm, upstairs in the bar at The London Welsh Centre, 157 – 163 Grays Inn Rd, WC1X 8UE. Tickets are free and can be booked here.