Owen Sheers

Owen Sheers (born 20 September 1974) is a Welsh poet, author, playwright and TV presenter. He was the first writer in residence to be appointed by any national rugby union team.

Biography

Owen Sheers was born in Suva, Fiji, in 1974 and brought up in Abergavenny, South Wales. He was educated at King Henry VIII comprehensive school, Abergavenny, New College, Oxford, where he captained the Oxford University Modern Pentathlon team, and at the University of East Anglia where he completed an MA in Creative Writing. He worked on The Big Breakfast as a researcher.

The winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 1999 Vogue Young Writer's Award, his first collection of poetry, The Blue Book (Seren, 2000), -a collection of poems about family, first love and farming life - was short-listed for the Wales Book of the Year and the Forward Poetry Prize Best 1st Collection, 2001. His debut prose work The Dust Diaries (Faber 2004), a non-fiction narrative set in Zimbabwe, was short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and won the Wales Book of the Year 2005.