Francesca Rhydderch

Francesca has a degree in Modern Languages from Newnham College, Cambridge, and a PhD in English from Aberystwyth University. She attended her first creative writing course, led by BBC Executive Producer Kate McAll and 128 The Authors 129 novelist Patricia Duncker, as the recipient of a BBC/Ty Newydd bursary in 2010. Her début novel, The Rice Paper Diaries, published in 2013, was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2014 for Fiction. Rhydderch’s short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies and broadcast on Radio 4. She recently received a Literature Wales bursary to work on her first collection of short fiction. Other projects include a play in Welsh, ‘Cyfaill’, about iconic Welsh-language writer Kate Roberts, for which she was shortlisted for the Theatre Critics Wales Best Playwright Award 2014. Rhydderch was born in Aberystwyth and now lives in Cardiff.