Rebecca Thomas
Rebecca Thomas is a scholar and creative writer specialising in the history, culture, and literature of medieval Wales. Her main area of research explores how Welsh identities were constructed in medieval texts. Her book History and Identity in Early Medieval Wales (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) examines how names, territory, language, and origin legends shaped national identity. The book won the Francis Jones Prize for Welsh History (2022), and in 2023 she received the Learned Society of Wales’s Dillwyn Medal for contributions to the humanities. Her current British Academy–funded research focuses on hostages in medieval Wales and the political and cultural connections between Wales and the wider world.
Alongside her academic work, Rebecca is also a creative writer and has published two medieval historical novels for young adults, Dan Gysgod y Frenhines (2022) and Y Castell ar y Dŵr (2023). In 2022 she was appointed Welsh Writer in Residence for Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, producing Anturiaethau’r Brenin Arthur (2024) in response to the nature and climate crises. Her essay Cribo’r Dragon’s Back won the inaugural O’r Pedwar Gwynt Essay Prize in 2021, and in 2025 she will be Artist in Residence in Ynys Enlli and one of the Hay Festival’s Writers at Work.
David Callander
David Callander is a medievalist and literary scholar who specialises in early Welsh poetry and medieval Welsh literature. His research is comparative in nature, seeking to explore what can be learnt by bringing together distinct literary traditions, comparing Middle Welsh, Old English, Middle English, and medieval Latin texts. He also undertakes comparative research between vernacular and Latin texts from medieval Wales and other Celtic languages. His other areas of interest include examining how modern literary theory and medieval literature can mutually inform one another, and studying the post-medieval transformation of medieval texts. This was the focus of his latest book Trawsffurfio’r Seintiau (Transforming the Saints, University of Wales Press, 2024), based on the trilingual hagiographic anthology Yale, Osborn fb229.
Writing Residency 16th-30th August 2025
David and Rebecca spent two weeks in Ynys Enlli as Resident Artists in August, continuing their research and writing on the island’s monks and saints!
David Callander is a scholar working on medieval literature. He has dealt with the lives of Welsh saints from the Middle Ages, editing several texts for the seintiau.cymru project and publishing his latest book, Transforming the Saints: The Yale Manuscript of the Lives of the Saints. University of Wales Press, 2024 on this subject. Rebecca Thomas is a historian and novelist. She has published three young adult novels with Gwasg Carreg Gwalch and her first adult novel, Y Tŵr , was published by Sebra in April 2025.