Collections

"This impressive debut includes poems on a wide range of themes: from recollections of a return to Fiji, to sharper memories of an adolescence in a rural town in Wales; from dark ruminations on farm life to tender and unconventional love poems. Owen Sheers has a talent for visual imagery, a flair for narrative and a grasp of the personal as acute as his awareness of the wider world. His astute portraits of relatives and contemporaries entice us into other lives. The Blue Book is a startlingly good first collection by a young writer of considerable ability and promise."

Ideas of separation and divorce—the geographical divides of borders, the separation of the dead and the living, the movement from childhood to adulthood, and the end of relationships—drive this poetry collection from one of Great Britain's rising young talents. The collection revolves around the poems "Y Gaer" and "The Hillfort," the titles themselves suggesting the linguistic divide in Wales, from poems concerned with childhood, a Welsh landscape, and family to an outward-looking vision that is both geographic and historic.

July 2018 marked the 70th anniversary of the National Health Service Act. Owen Sheers, the author of Pink Mist and the BAFTA nominated The Green Hollow , has created a virtuosic 'film-poem' for Vox Pictures/BBC, 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.