Francesca Rhydderch

Francesca Rhydderch (born 10 February 1969) is a Welsh novelist and academic. In 2013, her debut novel, The Rice Paper Diaries, was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2014 for Fiction. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Wales.

Biography Rhydderch was born in Aberystwyth. She obtained a BA in Modern Languages from Newnham College, Cambridge, and a PhD in English from Aberystwyth University.

Rhydderch worked as the Editorial Assistant at Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, and became Associate Editor of the magazine in 1999. As the recipient of a BBC/Tŷ Newydd bursary in 2010, she attended the creative writing course led by BBC Executive Producer Kate McAll and novelist Patricia Duncker. In 2015, she and Penny Thomas edited the New Welsh Short Stories.

Rhydderch has been a Creative Writing Associate Professor at Swansea University since 2015.

Awards The Rice Paper Diaries was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2014 for Fiction. The Welsh play, Cyfaill, was shortlisted for the Theatre Critics Wales Best Playwright Award 2014. In July 2015, Professor Matthew Francis from the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University presented Dr Rhydderch as Fellow.