GWENT author Owen Sheers, above, won £10,000 in a prestigious book competition.
The Abergavenny writer won the English award for The Dust Diaries in the Wales Book of the Year Competition.
This year's short-listed books were a mixture of novels and creative prose writing - three in Welsh and three in English.
Mr Sheers, who was born in Fiji but brought up in Abergavenny, published his first collection of poetry The Blue Book in 2000.
The Dust Diaries, which was short-listed for The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2005, is the story of his great great uncle.
He was a maverick missionary who went out to southern Rhodesia in 1900 originally for two years, but ended up staying there for the rest of his life.
Mr Sheers went to Zimbabwe for five months to research his great-great-uncle's life and his personal journey is the parallel story.
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