Penny Thomas Editor & Author

Francesca Rhydderch has a BA Joint Honours degree in Modern Languages from Newnham College Cambridge, and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Wales. Between 1997 and 1999 she was Editorial Assistant and subsequently Associate Editor at Planet: The Welsh Internationalist. Following a stint at Gomer Books as Editor of their English-language list, she took up the editorship of New Welsh Review in 2002. In 2008 she left the magazine in order to focus on and develop her writing. She published the Rice Paper Diaries (2013) with Seren (Wales Book of the Year: Fiction 2014) and was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2014 with her story 'The Taxidermist's Daughter'. Penny Thomas has a BA English Language and Literature from Keble College, Oxford. She trained as a journalist and worked for 14 years in regional journalism before moving to Seren where she has been fiction editor since 2006. She has also worked as a freelance editor for publishers including Chicken House, Parthian and Honno Welsh Women's Press, before setting up Firefly Press, a Wales-based children's publishing company in 2013.