Christopher Meredith has produced fiction, poetry and translations, as well as a little writing for radio and the stage, and articles and reviews, stories and verse for many magazines including Agenda, Poetry London, TLS and New Statesman, Planet, and Poetry Wales. Prizes include an Eric Gregory Award, the Arts Council of Wales Young Writer Prize and the Fiction Prize for his first novel, Shifts. Set against the decline of the steel industry in south Wales, it is regarded as a contemporary classic. In 2014 Shifts was shortlisted for the title of ‘Greatest Welsh Novel of All Time’ by Wales Arts Review, coming a very close second to the winner, Caradog Prichard’s Welsh language novel, Un Nos Ola Leuad, and topping the poll for novels written in English.
The second of his five novels, Griffri, was shortlisted for the Book of the Year Award in 1992. Set in the twelfth century, it covers some of the bloody history of the period from the point of view of a minor court poet, the Griffri of the title. Meredith has received two Arts Council Bursaries and has been judge for the Book of the Year Award and the Roland Mathias Prize. His poetry collection, The Meaning of Flight, was long-listed for The Book of the Year Award 2006. His fourth novel, The Book of Idiots, was published to acclaim in 2012. A collection of poems, Air Histories, was published in 2013.
His short story collection, Brief Lives – six fictions, appeared in 2018. His latest fiction, the short novel Please, and latest poetry collection, Still, were published simultaneously in April 2021.
His work is much studied and is the subject of a book-length study by Diana Wallace in the University of Wales Press’s Writers of Wales series.
Chris has spoken at many venues including the Hay Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, the Ledbury Poetry Festival, the London Book Fair, the Leipzig Book Fair, the Gasteig in Munich, The Goethe Institute in Brussels, and at the Writers and Teachers’ Centre in Manhattan, New York. He’s given readings, talks and lectures all over Britain as well as in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Germany, Finland, France, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Slovenia and the USA. He received a HALMA Scholarship in 2012-13 with writer’s residencies in Finland and Slovenia, and a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland in 2020.
Born and brought up in Tredegar and now living in Brecon, he has been a steelworker, a schoolteacher and a lecturer. He is Emeritus Professor of creative writing at the University of South Wales.