He was educated at King Henry VIII Comprehensive in Abergavenny and read English at New College, Oxford, before gaining his MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.

The winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 1999 Vogue Young Writer's Award, Sheers' first collection of poetry, The Blue Book, was shortlisted for the Welsh Book of the Year and the Forward Prize Best 1st Collection 2001.

His debut prose work The Dust Diaries, a travel memoir set in Zimbabwe, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize and won the Welsh Book of the Year 2005.

In 2004 he was Writer in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust and was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society's 20 Next Generation Poets.

Sheers' second collection of poetry, Skirrid Hill was published in November 2005 and won a Society of Authors Somerset Maugham Award. Skirrid Hill has recently been made a set text on the WJEC and AQA A level syllabuses in the UK.

His one man play Unicorns, almost is based on the life and poetry of the WWII poet Keith Douglas and was produced by Old Vic, New Voices in 2006 with Joseph Fiennes in the lead role.

Sheers' collaboration with composer Rachel Portman, The Water Diviner's Tale, an oratorio for children, was premiered at the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms 2007.

His first novel, Resistance, imagines an alternative wartime Britain in which German forces have occupied the country, the narrative centring upon the remote Welsh border valley of Olchon in 1944.

Sheers is currently a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, where he is conducting research for This Parliament of Monsters, an historical novel set in Fiji and New York over the last decades of the 19th century.

He has also written for radio, TV and newspapers and has toured extensively, most recently in New York, Croatia and Hungary.

Selected bibliography

• The Blue Book (Seren, 2000)
• The Dust Diaries (Faber, 2004)
• Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2005)
• Resistence (Faber, 2007)