Cynan Jones was born in 1975 near Aberaeron where he now lives and works.
He is the author of five short novels, The Long Dry, Everything I Found on the Beach, Bird, Blood, Snow, The Dig, and Cove.
He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous prizes and won a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award 2007, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize 2014, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015 and the BBC National Short Story Award 2017.
His work has been published in more than twenty countries, and short stories have appeared on BBC Radio 4 and in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta Magazine and The New Yorker. He also wrote the screenplay for an episode of the BAFTA-winning crime series Hinterland, and Three Tales, a collection of stories for children.
Cynan Jones was the 2008 Scritture Giovani Hay Festival Fellow, has tutored extensively for Literature Wales, the Arvon Foundation, and other writing bodies, and wrote and presents CBC’s online Writing Short Stories course. For a number of years he was the RLF Writing Fellow at Aberystwyth University and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
His latest work, available now from Granta books, is Stillicide, a collection of twelve stories commissioned by BBC Radio 4 that aired over the summer 2019.
‘Stock’ by Cynan Jones
‘Cynan Jones’s crystal-clear and embedded vision of an ancient rural world clinging on to modernity is redolent of the great John McGahern‘
Russell Celyn Jones
In March 2022 Cynan Jones was invited to join the Narrating Rural Change Network . His creative response, the short story ‘Stock’, is published by Nightjar Press (March 2023). This edition has sold out, but a PDF of the story can be downloaded here.