About
Jon Gower is a prize-winning author with over thirty books to his name. These include The Story of Wales, which accompanied the landmark BBC TV series and Y Storïwr, which won the Wales Book of the Year. His volume An Island Called Smith, about a disappearing island in Chesapeake Bay was awarded the John Morgan Travel Writing Prize. Recent publications include studies of the radical film-maker Karl Francis and the visual artist John Selway as well as Gwalia Patagonia, being an account of the Welsh settlement in Patagonia and Wales: At Water’s Edge about the country’s coastal path. Jon has also published five novels and five collections of short stories. He was an inaugural Hay Festival International Fellow and has been awarded an Arts Council of Wales Prize, a Creative Wales award and won both The National Eisteddfod Short Story Prize and the Allen Raine Short Story Competition.
Jon is currently researching a book about St George’s Channel and its facing coasts as part of the Ports, Past and Present project, translating the Sinbad stories and completing a trilogy of Welsh language police procedurals. He has a background in investigative journalism and was for some years a BBC arts and media correspondent. He also writes regularly for a range of publications and presents and makes TV and radio programmes for a variety of outlets, most recently a series of essays for BBC Radio 3 about Welsh mountains.