Owen Sheers was born on 20 September 1974 in Suva, Fiji, and grew up in Abergavenny in south Wales. He attended King Henry VIII School in Abergavenny before reading at New College, Oxford, where he captained the university's Modern Pentathlon team, an early signal of the athleticism and discipline that would mark his working life. He went on to complete an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and in 1999 received both the Vogue Young Writer's Award and an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.
His first poetry collection, *The Blue Book*, was published by Seren in 2000. Rooted in family, first love, and the farming landscape of south Wales, it was shortlisted for both the Wales Book of the Year and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second collection, *Skirrid Hill* (Seren, 2005), consolidated his reputation, winning a Somerset Maugham Award in 2006. Between the two collections came *The Dust Diaries* (Faber, 2004), a non-fiction narrative tracing the life of his great-great-uncle Arthur Shearly Cripps in Zimbabwe, which won the Wales Book of the Year in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize.
“Sheers has consistently pushed the poem into other forms.”
His verse drama *Pink Mist*, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, follows three young Bristolians through deployment in Afghanistan and their damaged returns home; it won the 2014 Welsh Book of the Year and was staged at Bristol Old Vic in 2015. His play *The Two Worlds of Charlie F* (2012), written about and partly performed by wounded soldiers, won the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award at the Edinburgh Festival. His 2011 collaboration with Michael Sheen, *The Gospel of Us*, reimagined the Passion Play over three days in Port Talbot, with the Last Supper staged at a social club and the Manic Street Preachers providing music. His novel *Resistance* — imagining a Nazi occupation of Wales after a failed D-Day — was translated into ten languages and adapted as a film Sheers cowrote, shot in the Black Mountains.
His range extends further still: an oratorio for children with composer Rachel Portman, premiered at the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms; a libretto for Mark Bowden's *A Violence of Gifts*, informed by research at CERN; a site-specific World War I play, *Mametz*, for the National Theatre of Wales; and a film-poem, *The Green Hollow*, broadcast by the BBC in 2016 to mark fifty years since the Aberfan disaster. In December 2011 he became the first writer-in-residence appointed by any national rugby union team, serving the Welsh Rugby Union — a role that fitted a man who had himself played scrum half for Gwent County.