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.

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.

In 2004 Sheers was Writer in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust and was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society’s 20 Next Generation Poets. Sheers' 2nd collection of poetry, Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2005) won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award. 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, and performed by Joseph Fiennes.

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