Judges
For The Dylan Thomas Prize 2008
The Judges for the 2008 Prize were recently announced at the Hay on Wye Festival.
PETER FLORENCE
Peter Florence is the Director of the Hay Festival. He is the Chair of the Panel of Judges for the Dylan Thomas Prize.
He was educated at Jesus College Cambridge and the Sorbonne and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Glamorgan. He was awarded an MBE for services to Literature in 2005. He is a Fellow of Hereford Art College, the British America Project and the Japan Foundation, and a Creative Fellow of the University of Bangor.
He is married to the Publisher, Becky Shaw, they have four sons.
EDWARD NAWOTKA
Edward Nawotka is a book columnist for Bloomberg News and staff writer for Publishers Weekly. His book criticism has appeared in dozens of publications, from the New Yorker to the blog of the Frankfurt Book Fair. He is a graduate of Boston College, Columbia University, and the University College Dublin. An archive of his work is online at edwardn.com.
OWEN SHEERS
Owen Sheers was born in Fiji in 1974 and brought up in Abergavenny, South Wales. 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) was short-listed for the Welsh Book of the Year and the Forward 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 Welsh Book of the Year 2005. In 2004 he was Writer in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust and was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society’s 20 Next Generation Poets. Owen’s second collection of poetry, Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2005) won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award and is a WJEC and AQA A level set text. Unicorns, almost his one man play based on the life and poetry of the WWII poet Keith Douglas was developed by Old Vic, New Voices.
Owen’s first novel, Resistance, has been translated into eight languages. His recent collaboration with composer Rachel Portman, The Water Diviner’s Tale, an oratorio for children, was premiered at the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms 2007. His essay Bomb Gone about Britain’s Christmas Island thermonuclear tests appears in Granta 101. Owen is currently a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
MIRANDA SAWYER
Miranda Sawyer started her career at Smash Hits, before moving on to Select Magazine where she won the PPA Magazine Writer of the Year Award in 1993, the youngest person ever to do so. She wrote a Time Out column from 1993-96, a column for The Mirror from 2001-2003, and won the In The City music-writing award for profiles on Paul Weller and Oasis written for The Observer. A contracted feature writer for The Observer for over fifteen years, she is the paper’s radio critic and writes the lead column for the Observer Music Monthly. She was a contributing editor for The Face and writes regularly for Vogue, The Guardian, and other newspapers and magazines.
Miranda presented YR.1, a landmark photography event for Channel 4 in 2001. She wrote and presented an hour-long programme on the age of consent for Channel 4 in 2004, and recently made a More 4 documentary about abortion rights in the USA. Her Radio 4 programmes include exclusive coverage of Damon Albarn’s 2001 Mali expedition; Sorted for Es and Wizz, a documentary investigating the legacy of rave music; and 1968: Sex, Telly and Britain, a three part series in 2008.
She has appeared in many discussion programmes including Newsnight Review, The Culture Show, Question Time, Music of the Millennium and What The Papers Say, and was on the judging panel for the 2007 Turner Prize. She was recently appointed to the Tate Members’ Council.
Her first book, Park And Ride, was published by Little, Brown, & Company in 1999, and has been reprinted in paperback several times since. She lives in London.
ANDREW DAVIES
Andrew Davies has been writing for the screen since 1965. His TV originals include A Very Peculiar Practice, Getting Hurt, A Few Short Journeys of the Heart, Filipina Dreamgirls, The Chatterley Affair and the sitcom Game On (with Bernadette Davis.) He has adapted Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Moll Flanders, Emma, Mother Love, House of Cards (for which he won an Emmy award,) Vanity Fair,Wives and Daughters and Take a Girl Like You for TV. Also Othello,The Way We Live Now, Daniel Deronda, Dr Zhivago, Tipping The Velvet, Boudica (The Warrior Queen) He Knew He Was Right, Bleak House, and The Line of Beauty. In production or preparation are Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Fanny Hill.
He has won six BAFTA awards, most recently in 2006 for Bleak House, and he was also awarded a BAFTA Fellowship in 2002. He has big-screen credits for Circle of Friends, Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Tailor of Panama, and Bridget Jones:The Edge of Reason. His (many) unmade films include Rossini, Rossini for Robert Altman and The Count of Monte Cristo for Roman Polanski.
Andrew Davies has also written children’s books (anyone remember Marmalade Atkins or Conrad’s War?) stage plays (ROSE and PRIN, both of which played in the West End and Broadway) two adult novels (Getting Hurt and B.Monkey) and a book of short stories, Dirty Faxes.
KURT HEINZELMAN
Kurt Heinzelman is Professor of English at the University of Texas and former Executive Curator and Pforzheimer Senior Fellow at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. He is also a resident faculty member of the James A. Michener Center for Writers. He has been a Fulbright Fellow (United Kingdom), a Charles A. Dana Fellow, a Danforth Foundation Fellow, and a Fellow of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He is also a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. He has published articles, poems and translations in an array of journals both here and abroad. His books of poetry are The Halfway Tree and Black Butterflies. His other books include The Economics of the Imagination, Make It New:The Rise of Modernism, and The Covarrubias Circle. Founding co-editor of The Poetry Miscellany, he is currently Advisory Editor for the Bat City Review.
PETER STEAD
Peter is Honorary Chairman of the Dylan Thomas Prize. Peter’s books include, Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in Britain and America (1989), Acting Wales (2002) and critical studies of Richard Burton (1991) and Dennis Potter (1993). He has written many articles on Labour History and on aspects of Popular Culture. For the University of Wales Press he has edited and contributed to four volumes of essays on rugby, football and music. He has served on the Board of Sgrin, the Welsh Media Agency and chaired its Film Production Committee. He is an active member of the Institute of Welsh Affairs and broadcasts regularly on the BBC
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