Owen Sheers

Owen Sheers is a poet, author and TV presenter who was raised in Abergavenny and attended King Henry VIII comprehensive school.

He wrote and presented ‘A Poet’s Guide to Britain’ for BBC4, has won Welsh Book of the Year (2005), and was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society’s ’20 next generation poets’. Earlier this year, he wrote the script for Port Talbot-raised Hollywood star Michael Sheen’s Passion Play, a community drama filmed over Easter in Port Talbot for the BBC.

On announcing his new role for Dance Blast in June 2011, Sheers said: “Dance Blast approached me to be a patron in the wake of my work on The Passion in Port Talbot. Before this experience I may well have questioned why a poet and author should be a patron of a dance company. But my experience on The Passion, in which I witnessed at first hand the inspirational and important work done by community arts organisations of all kinds and, in the performance itself, the potential for the arts to make a real difference to a community, meant I was thrilled to accept.”

“Writing and dance are both about craft and expression, about making connections,” he continued. “When young people work in these art forms they often become crucial conduits to confidence, insight and understanding. I hope, in becoming patron of Dance Blast, I can help them to foster an environment of arts excellence within the community where I grew up and where I was first introduced to the arts myself.”