Cynan Jones

Jones has been noted as an author and received some awards. In October 2017, he won the £15,000 BBC National Short Story Award for The Edge of the Shoal.

In 2014, Jones made headlines for not punctuating most of the speech in his novel The Dig (and a few other short stories). His characters' speech and ideas had been delineated through quotation marks (inverted commas) until John Freeman, an editor at the magazine Granta, took a chance and removed the speech marks to be "more immediate, more with it". The author agreed on the impact of this unconventional device and finished the rest of the book this way, save for one conversation between the protagonist and his mother. In that passage, Jones used traditional speech marks "to create a sense of a more conventional, staid dialogue." Writers like Cormac McCarthy, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett have experimented with this same lack of punctuation. By doing so, Jones went against a convention that has predominated since at least the late 18th century.

Jones was born near Aberaeron, Ceredigion. The Long Dry, his first novel, was awarded a 2007 Betty Trask Award. In 2008, the author himself was named as the Hay Festival Scritture Giovani. A chapter from The Dig, first published in Granta Magazine, was shortlisted for the 2013 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. The Dig, his most recent novel, won a 2014 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the 2015 Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize. That novel was also on the longlist for the 2014 Kirkus Prize in the US and the 2014 Warwick Prize for Writing.

Cynan Jones (born 1975) is a British writer from Wales, UK, who lives and works in Ceredigion. Jones published his first novel, The Long Dry, in 2006. In 2010 he published Le Cose Che Non Vogliamo Più (Things We Don't Want Anymore) in Italian. He later published three novels between 2011 and 2014. In autumn 2016, Cove became his sixth published work. His work has been translated into other languages, and his short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and publications like Granta and New Welsh Review. The story A Glass of Cold Water aired on BBC Radio 4 in May 2014.