2008 Award

Winner - Dannie Abse, The Presence (Hutchinson)

 

The Welsh-language prize was awarded to Gareth Miles for his novel, Y Proffwyd a’i ddwy Jesebel- published by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch.

The Short List

Dannie Abse, The Presence (Hutchinson)
Tom Bullough, The Claude Glass (Sort of Books)
Nia Wyn, Blue Sky July (Seren / Penguin)

The writers on the Welsh-language Short List were Tony Bianchi, Gareth Miles and Ceri Wyn Jones.

The Long List

 Trezza Azzopardi, Winterton Blue (Picador)
Kitty Harri, Hector’s Talent for Miracles (Honno)
Malcolm Pryce, Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth (Bloomsbury)
Tom Bullough, The Claude Glass (Sort Of Books)
Robert Lewis, Swansea Terminal (Serpent’s Tail)
Nia Wyn, Blue Sky July (Seren)
John Barnie, Trouble in Heaven (Gomer)
Carys Davies, Some New Ambush (Salt Publishing)
Dannie Abse, The Presence (Hutchinson)
Tessa Hadley, The Master Bedroom (Jonathan Cape)

The Judges

Mavis Nicholson
Born in 1930 and brought up in Briton Ferry, South Wales. She has led careers in advertising, copywriting and television presenting. She now lives in Powys and contributes to The Oldie magazine as an agony aunt. Mavis has worked for HTV, producing a film entitled People Like Us (1996), which explores how the deaths of both of her parents of Alzheimer’s Disease changed her life.

Damian Walford Davies
Academic, literary critic and editor. Damian is a lecturer in the English Department, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he specialises in English Romanticism, literature and politics in the age of the French Revolution, nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry, and the literatures of Wales. In 2002/03 he won the Ellis Griffith and L.W. Davies Awards for his scholarly edition of the prose writings of Waldo Williams.

Trevor Fishlock
Trevor Fishlock is a writer and broadcaster. He was staff correspondent of The Times in India, and New York and Moscow bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph. He has worked on assignment in more than sixty countries and has published widely. He writes and presents the popular Wild Tracks Series for ITV. He lives in Cardiff.

The Welsh-language panel were Siân Thomas (Chair), Huw Meirion Edwards and Aled Islwyn.