Judges

English–language Panel

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.

Welsh-language Panel

Siân Thomas
Siân’s broadcasting career took off at Swansea Sound radio station where she presented her own programme when she was at school and college.  She spent a few months as a researcher in the early days of Radio Cymru, before she joined S4C as one of the channel’s first presenters in 1982.  She currently presents a daily programme on Radio Cymru and still presents programmes for S4C.

Huw Meirion Edwards
Lives in Llandre by Aberystwyth and is a lecturer in the Department of Welsh at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.  He’s the author of many books and articles which are mainly about the literature of the Middle Ages; and he’s one of the editors of DafyddapGwilym.net, which is the new electronic edition of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s work.  He won the Chair at the National Eisteddfod in Newport in 2004.

Aled Islwyn
Author, editor, tutor and translator.  Born in Port Talbot, he’s lived and worked in Cardiff for most of his life.  He won the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize in 1980 and 1985; and he was the winner of the Wales Book of the Year 1995 by the Arts Council of Wales for his book, Unigolion, Unigeddau.