Owen Sheers was born in Fiji in 1974 and brought up in South Wales. The winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 1999 Vogue Young Writer's Award, his first collection of poetry, The Blue Book (2000) was short-listed for the Welsh Book of the Year. His debut prose work The Dust Diaries (Faber 2004), a travel memoir set in Zimbabwe was published in the UK, US and Holland and was short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and won the Welsh Book of the Year Award 2005.