Welcome to our war The Two Worlds of Charlie F. is a soldier's 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 Sheers's The Two Worlds of Charlie F. premiered at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, in January 2012 and toured nationally that summer.

At a family reunion in Wales several years ago, the prize-winning poet Owen Sheers stumbled across the mesmerizing story of his great-great-uncle Arthur Cripps, a mysterious figure who turned from poetry to missionary work in Africa and ultimately became a shamanlike figure, ministering to the locals.Arthur Cripps left his native England in a ship set for southern Rhodesia in 1900. During his time as a missionary in the British colony, Cripps became passionate about indigenous ways, leaving him ostracized from the largely racist, conservative European minority. Railing against colonial injustice, Cripps became a hero to the native population. He chose to exile himself from the Anglican church, factions of which branded him a heretic and burned down his churches. All the while he hid the soul-racking secret of what had driven him from England into the heart of Africa.The Dust Diaries is the haunting record of Sheers’s all-consuming attempt to piece together the luminous fragments of Arthur Cripps’s remarkable life, and to understand the mystery of why he abandoned England for life in the African veldt—a journey that takes Sheers from the genteel reading rooms of Oxford University’s libraries to the parched landscape of contemporary Zimbabwe. Refracting Cripps’s life through the prism of his own vivid imagination, Sheers illuminates the devastating effects of power, the potent effects of grace, and the legacy of an extraordinary life. Dust

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...

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...

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 farmer's daughter Rhian and the mysterious Branwen, in this tale by Owen Sheers. Wounded in Italy, Matthew O'Connell 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.

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...

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.