Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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Maybe avoid it at the weekend because of all the tourists, but you could go and have a drink where Dylan Thomas drank, and there’s some lovely seafood there and wonderful views. Tristram was a Victorian clergyman and ornithologist who categorised a list of birds he’d found in Palestine. Moving between the wild Welsh coast and war-torn Syria, Drift is a love story with a difference, and a hypnotic tale of lost identity, the quest for home and the wondrous resilience of the human spirit. He is Hamza, a Syrian refugee who has been held captive at a nearby Army barracks, and was badly injured when a truck moving him from the base fell into the sea as the coast road was torn away in a landslide. It’s an example of how information technology, counter-intuitively, can take us further away from deep knowledge and understanding.

There are magic realism elements to the story – which is usually a hard no for me - but they really work in this instance.Lewis is a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff University, and lives with her family on a farm near Aberystwyth.

Moved and moved so that he had become so far removed from where he had been, who he had been, that he no longer knew himself.I’ve worked with screen for a long time, and I find it a brilliant antidote to when I’m writing novels and working on my own. Print edition of BTO British Trust for Ornithology News landed today - winter edition containing a marvellous review by Lesley Hindley of our book by Jasmine Donahaye: Birdsplaining: A Natural History. Not far away Nefyn tries to heal Hamza’s battered body, cutting his hair (in an incredibly tender ritual) whilst slowly nursing him back to health and sharing with him her trove of beachcombed treasures – ‘the shells, herring-gull skulls, brittle stars and egg cases split and gaping. The clandestine camp where Hamza is being held is preparing drones to be shipped overseas, a soldierless way of waging war from the skies. She was raised in Aberaeron before moving at the age of twelve to her family's farm in the parish of Dihewy

TK Quentin is about to start a MA course in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. He ferries a lot of the Welsh students in town back and forth, and he always has copies of my books in the glovebox of his car. There’s an affinity with small countries with multiple languages, when you think of Catalan or other languages that are living side-by-side with dominant languages. Jasmine Donahaye in The Conversation UK on Victorian imperialist naming and claiming of Palestine's 'natural resources for western science, and for personal glory. On hunger strike, and clinging to past memories of a pre-war life (“every day was a day of resurrection”), it seems Hamza would rather die than stay incarcerated for an indefinite period of time, his days marked by regular mistreatment from sadistic prison guards.

It was a beautiful, beautiful city, and the story goes that the king had a big party and the guardsmen at the door, who had to close the doors to keep the seas out at certain times of day, got drunk, and of course the whole city was drowned. For fans of THE LAMPLIGHTERS and EXIT WEST, the hauntingly atmospheric English-language debut from the acclaimed, multi-award-winning Welsh author: a mesmerising love story between a young Welsh woman and a Syrian mapmaker.