Owen Sheers

Relocating to London when his journalist wife disappears during an assignment in Pakistan, a bereaved Michael bonds with new friends until a terrible accident and a shattering secret complicate his healing. By the award-winning author ofResistance.

I Saw a Man

1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, a German counterattack lands on British soil. Within a month, half of Britain is occupied. The seat of British government has fled to Worcester, Churchill to Canada. A network of British resistance cells is all that is left to defy the German army. Against this backdrop, Resistance opens with Sarah Lewis, a twenty-six-year-old farmer’s wife, waking to find her husband, Tom, has disappeared. She is not alone, as all the other women in the Welsh border valley of Olchon wake to find their husbands gone. With this sudden and unexplained absence, the women regroup as an isolated, all-female community and wait, hoping for news. Later, a German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. When a severe winter forces the two groups together, a fragile mutual dependency develops. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol’s commanding officer, Albrecht Wolfram, and it is to her that he reveals the purpose of the patrol. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on this isolated community, this fragile state of harmony is increasingly threatened. Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and confidence, Owen Sheers’s debut novel unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller. A hymn to the glorious landscape of the Welsh border territories and a portrait of a community under siege, Resistance is a first novel of grace and power.

Resistance

Winner of Wales Book of the Year Pink Mist is a verse-drama about three young soldiers from Bristol who are deployed to Afghanistan. School friends still in their teens, Arthur, Hads and Taff each have their own reasons for enlisting. Within a short space of time they return to the women in their lives (a mother, a wife, a girlfriend), all of whom must now share the psychological and physical aftershocks of their service. A work of great dramatic power, documentary integrity and emotional intensity, Pink Mist uses everyday yet heightened speech to excavate the human cost of modern warfare. Drawing upon interviews with soldiers and their families, as well as ancient texts such as the medieval Welsh poem Y Gododdin, it is the first extended lyric narrative to emerge from the devastating conflict in Afghanistan.

Pink Mist

Laura Bates

On Equality and Gender

Letters to the Future

Ideas of separation and divorce—the geographical divides of borders, the separation of the dead and the living, the movement from childhood to adulthood, and the end of relationships—drive this poetry collection from one of Great Britain's rising young talents. The collection revolves around the poems "Y Gaer" and "The Hillfort," the titles themselves suggesting the linguistic divide in Wales, from poems concerned with childhood, a Welsh landscape, and family to an outward-looking vision that is both geographic and historic.

Skirrid Hill

In 1966 a coal slag heap collapsed on a school in south Wales, killing 144 people, most of them children. Poet Owen Sheers has given voice to those who still live in Aberfan, the pit village in which tragedy struck, and uses their collective memories to create a striking work of poetic power. This is a portrait not just of what happened, but also of what was lost. What was Aberfan like in 1966? What were the interests of the people, the social life, the sporting obsessions, the bands of the day? What was the deeper history of the place? Why had it become the mining village it was, and what had it been before the discovery of coal under its soil? Perhaps most significantly: what is Aberfan like today? The Green Hollow is a historical story with a deeply urgent contemporary resonance; a story of what can happen when a community is run by a corporation. It is also a story known along generational rather than geographic borders. Based on the BBC One production, The Green Hollow is a beautifully rendered picture of a time and place - and a life-altering event whose effects are irrevocable.

The Green Hollow

Introduced and selected by the poet-presenter Owen Sheers, A Poet's Guide to Britain is a major poetry anthology that ties in with the BBC series of the same name.Owen Sheers passionately believes that poems, and particularly poems of place, not only affect us as individuals, but can have the power to mark and define a collective experience - our identities, our country, and our land. Under the headings of six varieties of British landscape - London and Cities, Villages and Towns, Mountains and Moorland, Islands, Woods and Forest, and Coast and Sea - he has collected poems that evoke qualities of the land, city and sea and have become part of the way we see these landscapes. The anthology follows a similar format to the BBC series, while also supplementing the poems included in the programme with his own personal favourites.

A Poet's Guide to Britain

Two Worlds of Charlie F.

Unicorns, Almost

Two stories, two different times, but the thread of an ancient tale runs through the lives of twenty-first century farmer's daughter Rhian and the mysterious Branwen ... After being wounded in Italy, Matthew O'Connell is seeing out WWII in an obscure government department spreading rumours and myths to the enemy. But when he's given the bizarre task of escorting a box containing six raven chicks from a remote hill farm to the Tower of London, he becomes part of a story over which he seems to have no control.

White Ravens

Welcome to our war The Two Worlds of Charlie F. is a soldier's view of service, injury and recovery. Moving from the war in Afghanistan, through the dream world of morphine-induced hallucinations to the physio rooms of Headley Court, the play explores the consequences of injury, both physical and psychological, and its effects on others as the soldiers fight to win the new battle for survival at home. Drawn from the personal experience of the wounded, injured and sick Service personnel involved, Owen Sheers's The Two Worlds of Charlie F. premiered at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, in January 2012 and toured nationally that summer.

The Two Worlds of Charlie F.

When Owen Sheers discovers a book in his father's study he stumbles upon the life of an obscure relative: Arthur Cripps, lyric poet and maverick missionary to Rhodesia. Compelled by the description of Cripps' extraordinary life in Africa, Sheers embarks on a journey through contemporary Zimbabwe in an attempt to better understand his ancestor's devotion to the country and its people and the dramatic, often bloody, differences that echo across the years.

The Dust Diaries

A few years ago, Owen Sheers stumbled upon a dusty book in his father's study by the extraordinary Arthur Cripps, part-time lyric poet and full-time unorthodox missionary, who served in Rhodesia for 50 years from 1902. Sheer's discovery prompts a quest into colonial Africa at the turn of the century, by way of war, a doomed love affair and friction with authorities. His personal journey into the contemporary heart of darkness that is Mugabe's Zimbabwe finds more than Cripps' legacy - Sheers finds a land characterized by terror and fear and blighted by the land reform policies that Cripps himself anticipated.

An utterly stunning novel of love, loss, the insidious nature of secrets, and the transformative power of words. I Saw a Man fulfills the promise of Owen Sheers's acclaimed novel, Resistance. When journalist Caroline Marshall dies while on assignment in Pakistan, her grief-stricken husband, Michael, leaves their cottage in Wales and returns to London. He quickly develops a friendship with his neighbors, Josh and Samantha Nelson, and their two young daughters. Michael’s becoming close with the family marks the beginning of a long healing process. But Michael's period of recovery comes to an abrupt end when a terrible accident brings the burden of a shattering secret into his life. How will Michael bear the agonizing weight of guilt as he navigates persistent doubts on the path to attempted redemption? The answer, revealed poignantly in Sheers' masterly prose, is eloquent, resonant, and completely unforgettable.

A Novel

Geraint Jones

Jon Gower

Robert Minhinnick

Gillian Clarke

Dan Llywelyn Hall

Eric Ngalle Charles

Sian Melangell Dafydd

Menna Elfyn

clare e potter

Laura Wainwright

Mary Gladys Coles

To coincide with the 50th anniversary of Offa's Dyke Path, a publication published by Ravenmade, featuring 12 newly commissioned poems & Dan's collection of paintings has been launched. The bilingual book features an introduction by Jon Gower and poetry by: Ifor ap Glyn (Poet Laureate of Wales), Gillian Clarke, Eric Ngalle Charles, Menna Elfyn, Robert Minhinnick, Oliver Lomax, Sian Melangell Dafydd, Owen Sheers, Laura Wainwright, Geriant Jones, clare e. potter and Gladys Mary Coles all inspired by Offa's Dyke.

Poetry and paintings inspired by Offa's Dyke

Walking with Offa / Cerdded gydag Offa

"This impressive debut includes poems on a wide range of themes: from recollections of a return to Fiji, to sharper memories of an adolescence in a rural town in Wales; from dark ruminations on farm life to tender and unconventional love poems. Owen Sheers has a talent for visual imagery, a flair for narrative and a grasp of the personal as acute as his awareness of the wider world. His astute portraits of relatives and contemporaries entice us into other lives. The Blue Book is a startlingly good first collection by a young writer of considerable ability and promise."

The Blue Book

In The Gospel of Us, Owen Sheers reimagines as fiction his play The Passion, a three-day dramatisation set in the streets, beaches and clubs of Port Talbot, co-directed by and starring Michael Sheen. Sheers' novella is told through the eyes of a Port Talbot boy who one morning stumbles upon a stranger in the windswept dunes, singing songs to the sea.At dawn a week later this stranger welcomes the Teacher, a local man who has been missing for 40 nights.And so begins three days of unearthly events in which a suicide bomber is soothed, the dead rise from an underpass and a community is made to remember itself once more. Sheers' novella is told through the eyes of a Port Talbot boy who one morning stumbles upon a stranger in the windswept dunes, singing songs to the sea. At dawn a week later this stranger welcomes the Teacher, a local man who has been missing for 40 nights.And so begins three days of unearthly events in which a suicide bomber is soothed, the dead rise from an underpass and a community is made to remember itself once more. The Gospel of Us is also a film, directed by Dave McKean.

Owen Sheers

Books

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