Academi Writers Bursaries Panel

Gwen Lloyd Davies – Chair of the Panel
Freelance publishing and literary consultant, formerly Publishing Editor for Parthian Books, and currently English Editor for Y Lolfa, based in Talybont, Ceredigion. She has worked with many of Wales’ respected writers, including Catherine Merriman, Jo Mazelis and John Sam Jones. She specialises in creative prose and children’s literature. She lives in Aberystwyth and is a fluent Welsh-speaker.

Idris Reynolds
Poet, librarian and tutor. He has twice won the Chair for strict–metre poetry at the National Eisteddfod, and has also won numerous other prizes. He frequently contributes poems and reviews to the Welsh-language literary periodicals, Barddas and Taliesin. He has published one volume of poetry and is a regular contestant on the popular Radio Cymru show, Talwrn y Beirdd (Battle of the Bards). A fluent Welsh-speaker, he lives in Brynhoffnant, Ceredigion.

Catherine Fisher
Catherine Fisher is a poet and novelist from Newport, Gwent. Winner of the Cardiff International Poetry Prize and Welsh Arts Council Young Writers Prize, she has published four collections of poetry. Catherine is also well-known as a writer of novels for children and young adults, often on fantasy or Science Fiction themes. Her books include Darkhenge, The Snow-Walker Trilogy, The Candleman and the four piece Book of the Crow. A recent work, The Oracle Trilogy, was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread prize and is an international bestseller. Corbenic, a novel about the grail legend, won the Mythopoeic Society of America’s Children’s Fiction Award in 2007. Her latest novel, Incarceron, was the Times Children’s Book of the Year 2007.

Amanda Hopkinson
Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Her most recent translations have been of Ricardo Piglia’s Money to Burn (Granta, 2003) and Paulo Coelho’s Devil and Miss Prym (HarperCollins, 2002). She is currently writing A History of Mexican Photography (Reaktion Books, forthcoming). 

 Kathryn Gray
Was born in Caerphilly in 1973 and raised in Swansea. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2001 and her first collection of poetry, The Never-Never (Seren, 2004), was nominated for both the T S Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2004. Her criticism has been published widely and she is currently poetry consultant for New Welsh Review.