The very difficult reality of ageing with dementia is explored and even this has a beauty and tenderness which brought me to tears. Drift, her first novel in English, is the story of how two people, two languages and two cultures can be a source of love, not friction.

Judge Emily Burnett, meanwhile, stated of Caryl’s novel, ‘It is a stunning piece of fiction, that swells with a magical lyricism and captures with sheer luminosity its characters, story and sense of place. I think we’re encouraged to think in broad strokes, to pull back and make generalisations about peoples. It is impossible not to be drawn into the writing, which contains so much atmosphere that it fills your imagination long after you've finished it.Here is the crisp and emotive prose of an athletic storyteller – one who’s novel, Martha, Jac a Sianco, is already considered a modern classic in Welsh literature – and she holds no truck with magical themes shrouded in prettified obscurity.

And to be present in conversations, to be visible in conversations I think is important as we develop as a nation.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He drove me home one evening and we got talking about literature, and he went and bought one of my books, which of course was in Welsh, and then he learnt Welsh.

When a series of unfortunate events sees Hamza tossed into a stormy sea, it is Nefyn who saves him and nurses him slowly back to health. It bursts with hope and gentle strength, and I was completely absorbed by it's wonderful characters. I’ve worked with screen for a long time, and I find it a brilliant antidote to when I’m writing novels and working on my own.There’s an affinity with small countries with multiple languages, when you think of Catalan or other languages that are living side-by-side with dominant languages. The rescued castaway who bears witness to this turns out to be a Syrian mapmaker who has suffered immense loss at the hands of the Syrian civil war, and who finds solace in the connection that he and Nefyn share. The novel is a lot about secrets: Nefyn and her connection to the sea, her and Joseph's family history (what happened to their mother? There are magic realism elements to the story – which is usually a hard no for me - but they really work in this instance. Her breakthrough novel Martha, Jac a Sianco (2004) is widely regarded as a modern classic of Welsh literature, and is on the Welsh curriculum, and the film adaptation - with a screenplay by Lewis herself - went on to win six Welsh BAFTAS and the Spirit of the Festival Award at the 2010 Celtic Media Festival.