We are all storytellers.
Words belong to everyone.
Eloise Williams is an award-winning author and the inaugural Children’s Laureate Wales 2019-2021. She was chosen for the prestigious Hay Festival Writers at Work Scheme and has an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from Swansea University where she now lectures. She failed her Art GCSE but likes to draw anyway.
Eloise is very proud to be from a working-class family and was lucky enough to spend her childhood living opposite a library in Llantrisant, in the South Wales Valleys. She now lives in a very old cottage on the Pembrokeshire coast with her artist husband Guy Manning and her scruffy dog, Watson Jones.
Eloise’s books have won the Wales Arts Review Young People’s Book of the Year (twice!), the Wolverhampton Children’s Book Award, the YBB Book Award, the Tir na nOg Readers’ Choice Award and have been shortlisted for the NE Book Awards and Wales Book of the Year.
Eloise collects sea glass and ghost stories, wanders forests and graveyards, and sings Welsh songs wherever she goes.
‘I lived opposite a library when I was young. It was my favourite place in the world. My sister – Jo, came with me to choose books.’
‘I read anything and everything and when I wasn’t reading I made other people read to me. My mother is reading me a lovely bedtime story here as she smokes a cigarette. This is what people did in the Seventies.’
‘I’ve always been into magical things and was fascinated by witches, ghosts and the power of nature in stories.’
‘I spend lots of time appreciating the magic of the world. Walking through woods, lying down in fields of wildflowers, making shapes of clouds and staring at the stars.
Sometimes I find trees with faces on my travels.’
‘I also spend a lot of time swimming in the sea.
Sometimes, if I’m lucky and the water is warm, my dog – Watson Jones comes with me!’
‘I get lots of the inspiration for my writing from the landscape and wildlife around me.’
‘I write lots about my love of theatre too.’
‘I hope you enjoy finding out more about my characters and stories.’