Christine Evans

Christine Evans has published six collections of poetry. Cometary Phases was Welsh Book of the Year in 1989 and her Selected Poems won the inaugural Roland Mathias Prize in 2005 with praise for her 'fresh eye and boldness of metaphor, a sense of living on the threshold of other worlds.' She has also published prose in the form of landscape pieces and stories for children, and was commissioned to write a year's journal and an extended account of a solitary journey to St David's in midwinter. Born in west Yorkshire, Evans came as a teacher of English to Pwllheli, her father's birthplace, almost forty years ago and has lived on the Llyn Peninsula ever since. She had an interest in learning Welsh from an early age, having picked up a few words from her grandmother. In 1969 she married into a family which had farmed on the island of Bardsey (Ynys Enlli) for many generations. She began writing poetry suddenly during maternity leave in 1976, and her first book was published seven years later. She is an experienced writing tutor, regularly teaching courses at Ty Newydd and on Bardsey Island, where she spends half the year with her fisherman husband and son. Her life there is usually too busy and briskly physical to allow for much writing. but she feels that she draws on its imagery of light and water through the winter months at her desk.