William Owen Roberts is a Welsh

Wales

Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...

 language novelist and writer of plays for radio

Radio

Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...

, television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 and theatre

Theatre

Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...

.

He was born in Bangor, Gwynedd

Bangor, Gwynedd

Bangor is a city in Gwynedd, north west Wales, and one of the smallest cities in Britain. It is a university city with a population of 13,725 at the 2001 census, not including around 10,000 students at Bangor University. Including nearby Menai Bridge on Anglesey, which does not however form part of...

, and studied Welsh Literature and Theatre Studies at the University of Wales

University of Wales

The University of Wales was a confederal university founded in 1893. It had accredited institutions throughout Wales, and formerly accredited courses in Britain and abroad, with over 100,000 students, but in October 2011, after a number of scandals, it withdrew all accreditation, and it was...

 from 1978 to 1981.

His writing is characterised by its originality and daring, dealing with subjects and ideas new to Welsh-language

Welsh language

Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...

 literature. For example, his first novel, Bingo!, is a reworking of the diaries of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

. His second novel, Y Pla (lit. 'The Plague', translated into English as Pestilence) is perhaps his best known and has been translated into multiple languages including English, Dutch and German.

Unlike many Welsh-language writers, much of his writing deals with areas of history not directly related to Wales, for example, his 2001 novel Paradwys is about the Atlantic slave trade

Atlantic slave trade

The Atlantic slave trade, also known as the trans-atlantic slave trade, refers to the trade in slaves that took place across the Atlantic ocean from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries...

, as is his most recent novel, Petrograd, set during the Russian Revolution

October Revolution

The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...

, which went on the win the Wales Book of the Year

Wales Book of the Year

The Wales Book of the Year is a Welsh literary award given annually to the best Welsh and English language works in the fields of fiction and literary criticism by Welsh or Welsh interest authors...

 award.

His work has been described as an example of the postmodern tradition.

His novels include:

• Bingo! (1985)

• Y Pla (1987)
  • Hunangofiant (1990)
• Paradwys (2001)
• Peenemunde (2004)
• Cymru Fach (2006)
• Petrograd (2008)