Welsh poet Dave Lewis judged our 2020 awards and our 2023 awards.
He is an award-winning Welsh writer, poet and photographer based in Pontypridd. He has written content for and still maintains many websites. He has written for BBC Wales, local newspapers and been published in a number of literary magazines and websites all over the world.
Resolutely unconventional and anti-establishment, he remains outside the metropolitan elite and even refuses to read in public anymore.
In 2007, he set up the first-ever Welsh Poetry Competition, an international poetry competition, now the biggest in Wales. In 2019, he created the Writers of Wales A to Z database, which seeks to highlight the abundance of literary talent either from Wales or with a deep connection to Wales, both past and present. He also runs Publish & Print, a book publishing company that is seeking good writers, particularly poets, who have been overlooked by the mainstream publishing industry.
His poetry collection ‘Going Off Grid‘ was a previous finalist in The Wishing Shelf Awards with a score of 39/40 from 17 judges. His poetry collection, ‘Scratching The Surface‘ is his twentieth book and has been praised by great British poets Brian Patten, David J Costello and Sally Spedding.
His last publication, ‘Africa Poems‘, is a ‘selected works’ of his African-themed poetry, which also includes a handful of his own images.
In 2020, he launched the Poetry Book Awards, an international contest that seeks to reward self-published poets, indies and small presses by helping to promote great poets that are so often overlooked by traditional publishers.
His novel, The Welsh Man, is a Welsh noir, gritty, urban tale set in Wales and the UK, highly praised by Welsh novelist Catrin Collier.
In May 2023, Libraries.Wales choose Dave to be their ‘Author of the Month’.
In April 2025, he released Wooden Spoon, a satirical dig at the failure of the WRU as four likely lads journey through the ill-fated 2025 Six Nations rugby campaign.
Visit his website.
To enter a book – click here.