Owen Sheers

Two stories, two different times, but the thread of an ancient tale from the medieval Celtic Mabinogion cycle runs through the lives of twenty-first-century farmers daughter Rhian and the mysterious Branwen, in this tale by Owen Sheers. Wounded in Italy, Matthew OConnell is seeing out WWll in a secret government department spreading rumors and myths to the enemy. But when he is given the bizarre task of escorting a box containing six raven chicks from a remote hill farm in Wales to the Tower of London, he becomes part of a story over which he seems to have no control. Based on Branwen, daughter of Llyr from the Mabinogion.

1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, half of Britain is occupied . . . Young farmers wife Sarah Lewis wakes to find her husband has disappeared, along with all of the men from her remote Welsh village.A German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrols commanding officer, Albrecht, and it is to her that he reveals the purpose of his mission - to claim an extraordinary medieval art treasure that lies hidden in the valley. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on this isolated community, this fragile state of harmony is increasingly threatened.

July 2018 marks the 70th anniversary of the National Health Service Act. Owen Sheers, the author of Pink Mistand the BAFTA nominated The Green Hollow, has created a virtuosic film-poem to coincide with the Vox Pictures/BBC production broadcast to mark the occasion. To Provide All People is the intimate story of the N.H.S in British society today. Depicting 24 hours in the service, with a regional hospital at the centre of the action, the poem charts an emotional and philosophical map of the N.H.S against the personal experiences that lie its heart; from patients to surgeons, porters to midwives. This is a world of transformative pains, triumphs, losses and celebrations that joins us all in our universal experiences of health and sickness, birth and death, regardless of race, gender or wealth. Based upon over 70 hours of interviews, the work is punctuated with the historical narrative of the birth of the N.H.S Act - from its origins in a local miners scheme in Tredegar in Wales, through multiple hearings, amendments and battles with the press, the B.M.A and the Conservative party, to its coming into effect in July 1948. To Provide All People is a work that excavates what the N.H.S. represents and means - on a personal and national level - and paints an authentic, tonal picture of a rare social phenomenon, illuminating with exquisite sensitivity and power why the ethos at its heart should always be protected.

Unicorns, Almost portrays the short life of World War II poet Keith Douglas, from his childhood through four engagements to his fighting in the Western desert, his accelerated education as a poet and his early death three days after the Normandy D-Day landings at the age of twenty-four. It is the story of his Faustian pact with a war that would nurture his unique poetic voice before taking it away. It is also the story of his desperate race to see his poems in print. Widely recognised as the finest poet of World War Two, Keith Douglas was championed by Ted Hughes as an important influence. Hughes wrote the introduction to Douglass Collected Poems, published by Faber.Unicorns, Almost by Owen Sheers opened at The Swan Hotel, Hay-on-Wye, in May 2018.

This edition has been fully updated to include the 2013 Six Nations and the British and Irish Lions Tour. What does rugby mean to Wales? Where does the heart of Welsh rugby lie? In Calon, Owen Sheers takes a personal journey into a sport that defines a nation. Drawing on interviews and unprecedented access with players and WRU coaching staff, Calon presents an intimate portrait of a national team in the very best tradition of literary sports writing. At the 2011 Rugby World Cup a young Welsh side captained by the 22-year-old Sam Warburton, captured the imagination of the rugby-watching world. Exhibiting the grit and brilliance of generations past, an ill-fated semi-final ended in heartbreak. But a fledgling squad playing with the familiarity of brothers had sent out an electrifying message of hope: could this be a third golden generation of Welsh rugby? It was with this question hanging in the air that Owen Sheers took up his position as Writer in Residence for the Welsh Rugby Union. Calon is the document of a year spent at the heart of Welsh rugby; the inside story of a 6 Nations campaign that galvanised a nation and ended in Grand Slam success for the third time in 8 years.

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.

Welcome to our warThe Two Worlds of Charlie F. is a soldiers 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 Sheerss The Two Worlds of Charlie F. premiered at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, in January 2012 and toured nationally that summer.

The event that changed all of their lives happened on a Saturday afternoon in June, just minutes after Michael Turner - thinking the Nelsons house was empty - stepped through their back door. After the sudden loss of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London and quickly develops a close friendship with the Nelson family next door. Josh, Samantha and their two young daughters seem to represent everything Michael fears he may now never have: intimacy, children, stability and a family home. Despite this, the new friendship at first seems to offer the prospect of healing, but then a catastrophic event changes everything. Michael is left bearing a burden of grief and a secret he must keep, but the truth can only be kept at bay for so long. Moving from London and New York to the deserts of Nevada, I Saw a Man is a brilliant exploration of violence, guilt and attempted redemption, written with the pace and grip of a thriller. Owen Sheers takes the reader from close observation of the domestic sphere to some of the most important questions and dilemmas of the contemporary world.

Winner of Wales Book of the YearPink 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.

"For years afterwards the farmers found them - the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades." So run the blunt, grimly beautiful opening lines of the Welsh poet Owen Sheerss elegy for the men, 4,000 of them from the 38th (Welsh) Division, who were killed or wounded in the Battle of Mametz Wood in July 1916. Sheers revisits that chapter of carnage in a stirring, sprawling promenade show. He draws on the writings of two survivors in particular. One is the poet David Jones whose fractured, enervated, modernist response to his war-time experiences, In Parenthesis, was hailed as a "work of genius" by TS Eliot. The other key influence is the writer Llewelyn Wyn Griffith. driven to wondering how the sun "could shine on this mad cruelty and on the quiet peace of an upland tarn near Snowdon"... We end up in dark woods and a place of numb desolation, bombarded by words that pierce the heart and vignettes that capture the stomach-churning sacrifice. The finest commemoration of the First World War centenary Ive seen to-date, this deserves a much longer life. Dominic Cavendish, Daily TelegraphMametz by Owen Sheers was premiered by National Theatre Wales in June 2014. It is one of the set plays on WJECs A level Drama specification. This dual edition combines the original English-language play with a Welsh-language translation by Ceri Wyn Jones, one of Waless most eminent poets.

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 using their collective memories has created a striking work of poetic power. Sheers set out to paint 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 was 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 felt to this day.

This story is set in the year 1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, half of Britain is occupied...Young farmer''s wife Sarah Lewis wakes to find her husband has disappeared, along with all of the men from her remote Welsh village. A German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol''s commanding officer, Albrecht, and it is to her that he reveals the purpose of his mission - to claim an extraordinary medieval art treasure that lies hidden in the valley. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on this isolated community, this fragile state of harmony is increasingly threatened.

In an imagined alternative 1944, after the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, half of Britain is occupied...Young farmer''s wife Sarah Lewis wakes to find her husband has disappeared, along with all of the men from her remote Welsh village. A German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol''s commanding officer, Albrecht, and it is to her that he reveals the purpose of his mission - to claim an extraordinary medieval art treasure that lies hidden in the valley. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on this isolated community, this fragile state of harmony is increasingly threatened.

The event that changed all of their lives happened on a Saturday afternoon in June, just minutes after Michael Turner - thinking the Nelsons' house was empty - stepped through their back door. After the sudden loss of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London and quickly develops a close friendship with the Nelson family next door. Josh, Samantha and their two young daughters seem to represent everything Michael fears he may now never have: intimacy, children, stability and a family home. Despite this, the new friendship at first seems to offer the prospect of healing, but then a catastrophic event changes everything. Michael is left bearing a burden of grief and a secret he must keep, but the truth can only be kept at bay for so long. Moving from London and New York to the deserts of Nevada, I Saw a Man is a brilliant exploration of violence, guilt and attempted redemption, written with the pace and grip of a thriller. Owen Sheers takes the reader from close observation of the domestic sphere to some of the most important questions and dilemmas of the contemporary world.

Features six films about six very different poems from six different places in the British Isles. This title includes films that tell the story of poems - where they come from, how they work and the nature and reach of their influence and legacy. It offers additional poems about the landscape and nature of Britain.

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.

Ayer me tropecé con una fototuya con diecisiete,sujetando un caballo y sonriendo,aún no mi madre.La gorrita ocultaba tus cabellos,tus pantorrillas largas eran las de un varón.Sujetabas las riendas, con la manoun puño por debajo de su enorme mandibula.Los arboles al viento inmoviles al fondo.El cielo granulado por la antigua pelicula.Pero lo que realmente me impacto fue tu cara:la mia.Crei que tu eras yo por un instante.Hasta que vi el abrigo de mujerceñido en la cintura, los pantalones anchosy la fecha arañada en una esquina.Entonces confirme que esa eras tu con diecisiete,sujetando un caballo y sonriendo,aun no mi madre,aunque yo claramente ya era tu hijo.Aun no mi madre, de Owen Sheers.Owen Sheers (1974), poeta, novelista, dramaturgo y profesor de escritura creativa en la Universidad de Swansea, es uno de los autores britanicos mas reconocidos de su generacion. Entre sus numerosas distinciones destacan el premio Somerset Maugham por su poemario Skirrid Hill (2005), la medalla del Hay Festival en la categoria poetica y el premio al mejor libro gales del año, que ha obtenido en dos ocasiones: por su relato de no ficcion The Dust Diaries (2004) y por su drama en verso Pink Mist (2013), emitido por Radio 4 de la BBC. Entre sus obras de teatro figuran Mametz y The Two Worlds of Charlie F., ganadora d...

After the sudden loss of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London to start again. Living on a quiet street in Hampstead, he develops a close bond with the Nelson family next door: Josh, Samantha and their two young daughters. The friendship at first seems to offer the prospect of healing, but then a devastating event changes all their lives, and Michael finds himself bearing the burden of grief and a terrible secret.