Alison Layland is a fiction writer, translator and editor, and has told herself stories for as long as she can remember, though she first started writing them down for others to share when she moved to Wales in 1997 and a Welsh language course led the way to creative writing classes.
She is the author of two novels: Someone Else’s Conflict (2014) and Riverflow (2019), published by Honno Press. She also writes short stories and flash fiction in English and Welsh, and won the short story competition at the National Eisteddfod in 2002. Her short story Quirky Robbers appeared in the anthology Cast A Long Shadow, published by Honno in 2023.
She translates from German, French and Welsh into English, and her published translations include a number of award-winning and best-selling novels. She won the Translators’ House Wales-Oxfam Cymru 2010 Translation Challenge with the translation, from French, of a short story by Haitian author Yanick Lahens, and was subsequently commissioned to translate her novel La Couleur de l’Aube (The Colour of Dawn), published in 2013 by Seren. She is also a freelance fiction editor.
A member of the Crime Cymru collective, she is actively involved in the First Novel competition and the Gŵyl Crime Cymru Festival.
When not writing, at home on the Welsh borders or on the boat she shares with her daughter on the Llangollen Canal, she is an environmental campaigner, and involved in various local community projects focusing on sustainability and the natural world.
