About Academi

Yr Academi Gymreig – The Welsh Academy is the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society of Writers. The Academi runs events, courses, competitions (including the Cardiff International Poetry Competition run with the support of Cardiff Council and offering a first prize of £5000), conferences (see details of the forthcoming Belfast Meets Wales conference here), tours by authors, lectures, international exchanges, events for schools, readings, literary performances and festivals. The Academi is also responsible for Services to Writers and now offers bursaries, critical advice and administers the annual Wales Book of the Year award.

The Academi represents the interests of Welsh writers (poets, novelists, fictioneers, storytellers, dramatists, critics) and Welsh writing both inside Wales and beyond. It works in partnership with Ty Newydd, the Cricieth-based residential writers’ centre.

In 1998 the Society won the franchise from the Arts Council of Wales to establish a Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency. The much-changed and enlarged Academi which emerged now administers the Writers on Tour scheme, a range of Writers’ Residencies, Development projects and Writing Squads for Young People, and offers support to those organising literary programmes of their own. To carry out this work the Academi has offices in Cardiff and fieldworkers based in North East, North West and West Wales. The Academi promotes its own events, including festivals at Ty Newydd and Cardiff Bay, and produces A470, a bi-monthly literature information magazine for the whole of Wales.

The Academi has a publishing programme which includes Taliesin, a quarterly literary journal in the Welsh language, New Welsh Review, Wales’s leading literary journal in the English language (in partnership with the Universities of Wales Association), The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales, The Welsh Academy English-Welsh Dictionary, and a variety of translated works. With support from the Lottery, the Society is currently engaged in the publication of the first Encyclopaedia of Wales, which will appear in both English and Welsh in February 2008.