What Academi Does
Academi is the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society for Authors
Visit our Timeline here.
Literary events and competitions
The Academi runs events, courses, competitions, including the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, with the support of Cardiff Council and offering a First Prize of £5000, conferences, tours by authors, lectures, international exchanges, events for schools, readings, literary performances and festivals. Academi is also responsible for the National Poet of Wales project.
Opportunities for writers: bursaries, mentoring and other services
The Academi has taken over from the Arts Council of Wales (ACW) responsibility for Services to Writers and now offers financial bursaries, critical advice and mentoring. On this site writers can view listings of publishers, a directory of writers’ groups, organisations of interest to authors and advice on literary agents and the business of authorship.
Wales Book of the Year
The Wales Book of the Year prize is awarded to the best book in Welsh and the best book in English. The authors each receive £10,000. The 2007 winners – Lloyd Jones for Mr Cassini (Seren) and Llwyd Owen for Ffydd Gobaith Cariad - were announced at a glittering ceremony at the Hilton Hotel Cardiff on 9 July 2007.
Who is the Academi for?
The Academi represents the interests of Welsh writers (poets, novelists, fictioneers, storytellers, dramatists, critics) and Welsh writing both inside Wales and beyond. It works in partnership with Tŷ Newydd, the Cricieth-based residential writers’ centre and with the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea. In 2005 it opened its resource centre for writers at the new Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay - Glyn Jones Centre - in memory of the late author and poet.
In 1998 Yr Academi Gymreig won the franchise from ACW to establish a Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency. It is now responsible for funding events across Wales under the Writers on Tour scheme - which includes a range of writers’ residencies, development projects, Young People’s Writing Squads - as well as offering support to those organising literary programmes of their own. To carry out this work the Academi has offices in Cardiff and fieldworkers based in North and West Wales.
The Academi’s publishing programme include
s
A470, a bi-monthly literature information magazine for the whole of Wales, Taliesin, a quarterly literary journal in the Welsh language, The New Welsh Review, Wales’s leading literary journal in the English language (in partnership with the Universities of Wales Association), The Companion to the Literature of Wales, The Welsh Academy English-Welsh Dictionary, and a variety of translated works. With support from the Lottery, the Society is currently engaged in the publication of the first Encyclopaedia of Wales, which will appear in both English and Welsh in 2007.
Information on all these ventures and services can be found on this web site.
Read about Gwyn Thomas, the second National Poet of Wales, here.
To read more on Cardiff’s first Capital Poet, click here.
If you need further information or advice or have suggestions for new ways in which the Academi could work then please get in touch.