Vote for the Wales Book of the Year 2024 People’s Choice Award
13 Jun 20242 minute read
The Wales Book of the Year Award celebrates talented Welsh writers who excel in a variety of literary forms in both Welsh and English.
There are four categories in both languages – Poetry, Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction and Children and Young People, with one of the category winners going on to win the Overall Award and claiming the title, Wales Book of the Year. The Shortlist consists of 24 books in total – twelve in each language, three in each category.
The English-language Shortlist 2024, sponsored by Cardiff University’s School of English, Communication and Philosophy and Nation.Cymru is:
Poetry Award
I Think We’re Alone Now, Abigail Parry (Bloodaxe Books)
Birdsplaining: A Natural History, Jasmine Donahaye (New Welsh Rarebyte)
Spring Rain, Marc Hamer (Harvill Secker)
The Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award
Stray Dogs, Richard John Parfitt (Third Man Books)
The Unbroken Beauty of Rosalind Bone, Alex McCarthy (Doubleday)
Neon Roses, Rachel Dawson (John Murray)
The Bute Energy Children and Young People Award
Where the River Takes Us, Lesley Parr (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
Brilliant Black British History, Atinuke (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
Skrimsli, Nicola Davies (Firefly Press)
You can vote for your favourite below by tapping on the red vote box under the book you want to vote for.
You can only vote once.
Where the River Takes Us
Jason lives with his big brother, Richie, trying their best to make ends meet so they can stay together.
They've got supportive neighbours and some great friends, but there's... Read more
Jason lives with his big brother, Richie, trying their best to make ends meet so they can stay together.
They've got supportive neighbours and some great friends, but there's always the threat that someone will think they can't manage on their own since their parents died.
It’s February 1974
and working-class families have been hit hard by the three-day week.
The reduced power usage means less work, and less money to get by on.
Richie is doing his best, but to make enough money, he’s been doing favours for the wrong people.
An urban legend about a beast in the valleys catches Jason's eye in the local paper.
A wild cat is said to roam the forest, far up the river from their bridge.
A reward is offered for proof of The Beast’s existence.
Jason's friends are desperate to help him, and they convince him that this is the answer to his and Richie’s money problems.
And so a quest begins.
Four best friends soon find themselves on a journey that will change each of them…forever.
In Spring Rain, writer and gardener Marc Hamer shares his path from difficult beginnings to contentment, by way of family gardens.
As a young boy in a violent home, Marc found refuge in his small back garden.
Here he kindled a lifelong love of nature and learning by observing the plants and insects in his private kingdom and reading the old encyclopaedias he found in the shed.
Marc has always found the answers to life's questions in the natural world, whether as a child watching ants, as a young man living rough in the countryside, or as a professional gardener creating places of calm and restoration for others.
Now in his sixties, he is finally creating a garden for himself, at his home in Cardiff.
In this beautiful and moving memoir, he considers what he has learned, from the spring of youth to his autumn years, and reflects on how we reconcile our childhoods with where we end up.
With line drawings by the author, Spring Rain encourages us back in tune with the natural world and offers both consolation and a guide to a happier life.
Skrimsli is the second fantasy adventure from author Nicola Davies set in a world where animals and humans can sometimes share their thoughts.
It traces the early life of Skrimsli, the tiger sea captain who, along with his friends, Owl and Kal, must escape the clutches of a tyrannical circus owner, then stop a war and save the ancient forest.
This is the account of Tom Bullough’s journey along Sarn Helen – Helen's Causeway – the old Roman Road that runs from the south of Wales to the north.
As Bullough walks the route, he explores the political, cultural and mythical history of this small country that has been divided by language and geography.
Woven into this journey are conversations with climate scientists and the story of Tom’s engagement with the urgent issue of the climate crisis, showing us its likely impact on Wales, which is – in miniature – a vision of what lies ahead for us all.
It's 1984 in a valley in south Wales: the miners' strike is ravaging her community; her sister's swanned off with a Thatcherite policeman; and her... Read more
Eluned Hughes is stuck.
It's 1984 in a valley in south Wales: the miners' strike is ravaging her community; her sister's swanned off with a Thatcherite policeman; and her boyfriend Lloyd keeps bringing up marriage.
And if they play '99 Red Balloons' on the radio one more time, she might just lose her mind.
Then the fundraising group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners comes down from London, and she meets June, a snaggle-toothed blonde in a too-big leather jacket.
Suddenly, Eluned isn't stuck any more - she's in freefall.
June's an artist and an activist. With June, Eluned can imagine a completely different life for herself.
But as her family struggles with the strike, and her relationship with her sister deteriorates, should she really leave it all behind?
From the Valleys to the nightclubs of Cardiff, London and Manchester, Neon Roses is a heartwarming, funny and a little bit filthy queer coming-of-age story with a cracking '80s soundtrack.
I Think We’re Alone Now was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility.
I Think We’re Alone Now was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility.
Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles.
Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like.
So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another.
Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles.
On receiving news of a beloved teacher’s death, a man struggles with the loss of a relationship sustained by deep admiration and unrequited love.
Memories of their shared journey are separated into three orbits where the man’s past, present, and future are punctuated by intense grief.
In Orbit uses a variety of innovative forms to explore loss, from traditional stanzas to prose poems to shaped poems in the form of birds, circuits, or hands.
The narrative shifts in time, moving from his teen years to the present day when he himself has become a teacher, working alongside the man he mourns.
The book not only grieves the loss of the teacher, but also toxic standards for boys and men.
Beyond human connection, sustenance is found in the moon, the stars, the sky, and nature.
The discovery of a badger’s track or the treasure of a bird egg reminds us how small trajectories are in the context of the more-than-human: an answer perhaps to the grieving process.
The poems in Cowboy are knowing, millennial, internet-sick, funny, but there are deeper undercurrents, too: of embodied and disembodied spiritualities; of the knowledge of animals; of familial mythologies; of grief... Read more
The poems in Cowboy are knowing, millennial, internet-sick, funny, but there are deeper undercurrents, too: of embodied and disembodied spiritualities; of the knowledge of animals; of familial mythologies; of grief and longing; of autism and navigating diagnoses; of early and enduring disappointment; of the wildness underneath the smooth glass-and-chrome surfaces of contemporary life.
Tucked into the Welsh valleys and encircled by silver birch and pine, the village of Cwmcysgod may appear a quiet, sleepy sort of place. But beneath the surface, tensions simmer,... Read more
Tucked into the Welsh valleys and encircled by silver birch and pine, the village of Cwmcysgod may appear a quiet, sleepy sort of place. But beneath the surface, tensions simmer, hearts ache, and painful truths threaten to emerge.
Sixteen-year-old Catrin Bone knows only what she has been told. Now, she is beginning to question her small world, and a version of the past that seems to entrap and embitter her reclusive mother, Mary.
The sins of the past are approaching, for it takes a village: to raise a child, to bring down a woman, to hide something monstrous and to look the other way.
In this tender, sly, exquisitely wrought novella, a unique cast of characters give voice to their versions of the truth.
But it is the story of Rosalind Bone, of her strength and of all that she has endured, that rises above the rest, shimmering with hope and possibility...
A wren in the house foretells a death, while a tech-loving parrot aids a woman’s recovery.
Crows’ misbehaviour suggests how the ‘natural’ order, ranked by men, may be challenged.... Read more
A wren in the house foretells a death, while a tech-loving parrot aids a woman’s recovery.
Crows’ misbehaviour suggests how the ‘natural’ order, ranked by men, may be challenged.
Whose poo is the mammal scat uncovered in the attic, and should the swallows make their home inside yours?
The nightjar’s churring brings on unease at racism and privilege dividing nature lovers, past and present.
The skin of a Palestine sunbird provokes concern at the colonial origins of ornithology.
And when a sparrowhawk makes a move on a murmuration, the starlings show how threat – in the shape of flood, climate change or illness – may be faced down.
Jasmine Donahaye is in pursuit of feeling ‘sharply alive’, understanding things on her own terms and undoing old lessons about how to behave.
Here, she finally confronts fear: of violence and of the body's betrayals, daring at last, to ‘get things wrong’.
Roaming across Wales, Scotland and California, she is unapologetically focused on the uniqueness of women’s experience of nature and the constraints placed upon it.
Sometimes bristling, always ethical, Birdsplaining upends familiar ways of seeing the natural world.
An eye-opening story of Britain, focusing on a part of our past that has mostly been left out of the history books: the brilliant Black history of England, Scotland, Wales... Read more
An eye-opening story of Britain, focusing on a part of our past that has mostly been left out of the history books: the brilliant Black history of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Did you know that the first Britons were Black? Or that some of the Roman soldiers who invaded and ruled Britain were Black, too?
Join this fascinating journey through the ages to meet those first Britons, as well as the Black Tudors, Georgians and Victorians who existed in every walk of life here.
The incredible journey through time is brought to life through Atinuke's fascinating storytelling and illustrated scenes, detailed maps, and timelines created by illustrator Kingsley Nebechi.
From science and sport to literature and law, celebrate the brilliant Black people who have helped build Britain.
Learn about key and complex historical topics such as the world wars, slavery, the industrial revolution, Windrush and the Black Lives Matter movement.
This fascinating book will change everything you thought you knew about our green-grey British isles.
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