Waterstones announces Welsh Book of The Year 2025

Stephen Price

Anthony Shapland’s ‘brave and powerful’ debut novel, A Room Above a Shop, has been announced as Waterstones Welsh Book of the Year 2025.

With his utterly stunning debut novel, Anthony Shapland emerges as a major new voice in Welsh fiction.

A Room Above a Shop is an intimate portrait of two individuals in love and the hardships they face as an LGBTQ+ couple in the latter part of the 20th century.

The novel’s Welsh language adaptation, Lan Stâr, translated by Esyllt Angharad Lewis in dialogue with the author, was published in September.

Now in its fourth year, The Waterstones Welsh Book of the Year champions books by Welsh authors, or titles that have a strong Welsh setting.

Previous winners of Waterstones Welsh Book of the Year are: Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins by Claire Fayers (2024), Sarn Helen by Tom Bullough (2023) and Drift by Caryl Lewis (2022).

Anthony Shapland grew up in Bargoed, Caerphilly. He is a writer and artist, and founder of
g39, an artist-led space in Cardiff.

Kate Willetts, Bookseller, Waterstones Cardiff, said “Shapland’s prose is sparse and beautifully crafted, with a richness that perfectly captures the story in all its light and shade.

“It’s a book that you could read in an afternoon, but that will stay with you for much longer. I finished
it and, unusually for me, felt like I could very easily pick it up and read it again immediately.

“I wanted to live beside the characters and their little world for a while longer. I absolutely loved this sweet and sad novel: a special debut that deserves to be shared.”

Jasmine Lawson, Bookseller, Waterstones Aberystwyth, adds: “Tender, evocative and poetic. Shapland poignantly captures the intricacies of life as a gay man in a small town in south Wales during the 80s.

“A Room Above a Shop is a brave and powerful debut.”

After receiving the news of his most recent accolade for A Room Above a Shop, Anthony Shapland commented: “It’s sometimes incredible to think that the pencil scribbles and plans from my notebooks grew into sentences and then a novel that is now Waterstones Welsh Book of the Year.

“It felt like an important story to tell and the responses from readers and reviewers and the support from booksellers is humbling. Thank you all!”

Anthony Shapland will be signing copies of A Room Above a Shop at Christmas shopping events, including Waterstones Swansea on Thursday 4 December.

For further event information and timings please check the Waterstones website.

A Room Above a Shop

The novel details snapshots of two quiet men who form a tentative connection neither knows where it might lead.

M has inherited his family’s ironmongery business and B is younger by eleven years and can see no future in the place where he has grown up, but when M offers him a job and lodgings, he accepts.

As the two men work side by side in the shop, they also begin a life together in their one shared room above – the kind of life they never imagined possible and that risks everything if their public performance were to slip.

Unfolding against the backdrop of Section 28, the age of consent debate and the HIV and AIDS crisis, this is a tender and resonant love story, and a powerful debut.

Anthony Shapland’s short story Foolscap was shortlisted for the Rhys Davies Award and he was selected for the Hay Writers at Work programme in 2023. This is his debut novel.

Nation Cymru’s review of this most deserved winner summed up: “This is a book of deep importance to Wales’ hidden histories, most of which we will never know, we will never bring back, and a glimpse at a world – a thrill and a hurting – so few will ever understand first hand.”

Read Nation Cymru’s review here.

Purchase A Room Above a Shop and its Welsh translation, Lan Stâr, translated by Esyllt Angharad Lewis, from Waterstones and all good book shops.