Alys Conran, who won second prize in the 2012 Bristol Short Story Prize, has received some great news – she has been named as the recipient of the Hay Festival Creative Wales International Fellowship for 2019-2020.

Funded by Arts Council of Wales, the Fellowship enables a writer from Wales to take part in Hay Festivals not only in Wales, but also Mexico, Spain, Peru, Colombia and Croatia. The Hay website states that the Fellowship “is open to exceptional, ambitious and imaginative creative individuals, working within the literature art form, providing a unique opportunity for career development, while increasing Wales’s artistic profile internationally.”

Alys’ second novel Dignity was published earlier this year. Her debut novel, Pigeon, enjoyed great succes, winning the Wales Book of the Year Award 2017, the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award, and the Wales Arts Review People’s Choice Award. It was, also, shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and longlisted for the Author’s Choice First Novel Award.

Quoted on the Hay Festival website, Alys says: “I’m so honoured and delighted to be Hay International Fellow this year, and looking forward to having multilingual conversations, developing cross-cultural creative ideas and sharing inspiration at these wonderful festivals. I’ll not be forgetting where I’m from, though, and will be taking a piece of Welsh writing slate to each place, to honour the role that slate once had in supporting writing and literacy throughout the world.”

We wish Alys great success with the Fellowship and her future writing.

Alys Conran won second prize in the 2012 Bristol Short Story Prize for her story, Lobster. It is published in our 5th anthology by Tangent Books. For more information, please visit https://www.tangentbooks.co.uk/bristol-short-story-prize/bristol-short-story-anthology-volume-5.html