Rhiannon Lewis

Brought up on a small farm on the coast near Cardigan, west Wales, Rhiannon Lewis now lives near Abergavenny. She won her first literary competition, held by her local county libraries, at 17 with a collection of short stories. Writing had to take a back seat whilst raising a family and earning a living, but in 2017, she published her debut novel, My Beautiful Imperial, based on the story of how her great-great uncle got tangled up in the Chilean civil war of 1891. The book was listed by the Walter Scott Prize Academy as one of its 20 recommended historical novels of 2018. An early draft of The Significance of Swans came second in the New Welsh Writing Awards in 2019, and her I Am the Mask Maker and other stories was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Fiction prize in 2022.