Patrick McGuinness wins second Welsh Book of the Year award
Writer Patrick McGuinness has won the Welsh Book of the Year award for the second time in four years.
His memoir Other People's Countries is about his childhood in the town of Bouillon on the Belgian border, where his mother was born. Mr McGuiness, who also topped the non-fiction category, won the prize in 2012 for his novel The Last Hundred Days. The Welsh-language award, presented in Caernarfon, went to Gareth F Williams for his wartime novel Awst yn Anogia. Judge and poet Paul Henry said McGuinness's book was stylistically "brilliant". "It's a poet's prose at its best - perfectly paced, effortless in its devices," he added. McGuinness beat Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys, whose book American Interior was shortlisted. It was part of a multi-media project retracing the journey of his distant ancestor, the explorer John Evans. McGuinness, who is an Oxford professor of French and comparative literature, picked up the award in his home town Caernarfon. His debut novel, a spy thriller inspired by his experience of the 1989 Romanian revolution, had won the award four years ago and was also long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. The winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award 2015 was Tiffany Atkinson for So Many Moving Parts. Cynan Jones won the fiction prize in English for his story of a grieving farmer and a badger-baiter, The Dig. Costa Poetry Prize winner Jonathan Edwards won the Wales Arts Review People's Choice Prize for his debut collection My Family and Other Superheroes.