Diana Powell was born and brought up in Llanelli, South Wales, and studied English at Aberystwyth University.
Her stories have won, or been listed, in a number of competitions, including the 2022 Bristol Short Story Prize (winner), the 2020 SoA ALCS Tom-Gallon Award (runner-up), the 2019 Chipping Norton Literature Festival Short Story Prize (winner) and the 2014 PENfro award (winner). She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her work has been featured in a number of anthologies, including ‘Best (British) Short Stories 2020’ (Salt), ‘Botanical Short Stories’(History Press), Honno’s ‘Cast a Long Shadow’, ‘Heartland’, an anthology of the 2019 PENfro competition winners (Parthian) and several of Arachne Press’s collections. It is also to be found in several journals, such as ‘The Lonely Crowd’, ‘Crannog’, ‘The Blue Nib’, ‘Tears in the Fence’ and ‘Dream Catcher’.
Her longer works are: ‘Esther Bligh’ (a novella, Holland House Books, 2018), ‘Trouble Crossing the Bridge’ (short story collection, 2020, Chaffinch Press), ‘things found on the mountain (novel, Seren Books, 2023). Her latest novella, ‘The Sisters of Cynvael’, was published in May, 2024, by Cinnamon Press, following its win in the Cinnamon Press Literature Award.
In 2022, she was commissioned to write about Pembrokeshire’s holy wells for the Ancient Connections project. The resulting chapbook, ‘Song of the Water,’ was published by Parthian in 2023.
She now lives with her husband in Pembrokeshire, and when she is not writing, she works in her woodland garden, or walks on the coast.
