Stevie Davies is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University. She has published widely in the fields of fiction, literary criticism, biography, and popular history. Her work has been longlisted for the Booker and Orange Prizes and has won The Fawcett Society Prize and The Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year award. Her novel The Web of Belonging (1997) was adapted as a Channel 4 television film. Her novel The Element of Water (2001) was long-listed for the Booker and Orange Prizes and won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year in 2002. Stevie has three children who are the joy of her life. She is a cyclist and sea-swimmer. Davies has been called 'lyrical yet pitiless' in her dissection of the past (Helen Dunmore, The Guardian), whilst her prose is known as 'quiet, delicate, supple' (Nicholas Murray, The Independent).