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Carys Davies


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Carys Davies’s debut novel West (2018) was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, runner up for the Society of Authors' McKitterick Prize, and winner of the Wales Book of the Year for Fiction. Her second novel The Mission House was first published in the UK in 2020 where it was The Sunday Times 2020 Novel of the Year.

She is also the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, which won the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She is the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Prize, the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Short Story Award, a Northern Writers’ Award, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, and is a member of the Folio Academy. Her fiction has been translated into nine languages.

Born in Wales, she grew up there and in the Midlands, lived and worked for twelve years in New York and Chicago, and now lives in Edinburgh.
 


Genres: Literary Fiction, Historical
 
Novels
   West (2018)
   The Mission House (2020)
   Clear (2024)
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Collections
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Series contributed to
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Books containing stories by Carys Davies
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Head Land (2016)
10 Years of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize
edited by
Rodge Glass
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Love (2012)
Great Short Stories for Women by Women
edited by
Victoria Hislop

Award nominations
2025 Walter Scott Prize for Best Historical Novel (longlist) : Clear
2025 Libby Award for Best Historical Fiction (nominee) : Clear
2024 Saltire Literary Award (shortlist) : Clear
2024 HWA Gold Crown Award (shortlist) : Clear
2019 The Writers' Prize for Fiction (nominee) : West


Carys Davies recommends
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Flesh (2025)
David Szalay
"In Istvan David Szalay has created a modern existential antihero in the grand tradition of Camus and Dostoevsky. Amid the random accidents and desultory decisions that shape his life, and come to feel like fate, he is at once a cool observer and a towering presence. Taut, spare and perfectly structured, Flesh reads like a gripping thriller which slowly gathers to itself the emotional power of classical tragedy."
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The Borrowed Hills (2024)
Scott Preston
"Scott Preston lifts the veil from the picture-postcard beauty of Britain's Cumbrian fells to expose an atmosphere of festering despair in the lives of two farmers who lose everything when their sheep are destroyed by the government in order to contain an outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease. When they take desperate measures to rebuild their shattered world, what happens feels tragically inevitable. The Borrowed Hills is a story of anger and violence, devotion, love, and back-breaking hard work, told with dark, dead-pan humour and a rough kind of poetry."
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Though the Bodies Fall (2023)
Noel O'Regan
"I was immediately drawn into O'Regan's delicately wrought debut by the tenderness he has for his characters, and by the quiet power that builds beneath the surface of his storytelling."

More recommendations 


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