A writer from New Quay has been longlisted for a New Welsh Writing Award.

Marilyn Barlow is in the running for the Rheidol Prize for writing with a Welsh theme or setting for her non-fiction book, The Smallholding I Knew.

New Welsh Review announced that Marilyn was in the running for the award with six others writers from across the UK.

The New Welsh Writing Awards, now in their fifth year, were set up in 2015 to champion the best short-form writing in English.

In the Rheidol category, the awards attracted a strong field of both fiction and non-fiction, varying from an epistolary account from the 1700s, to a memoir of growing up in Zimbabwe and on a Ceredigion smallholding, to a story set in interwar Cardiff.

“We ascend slate-quarry faces with ’80s oddball postal dole-claiming rock climbers in Snowdonia, while elsewhere in the longlisted entries we learn about the gaps between generations and the current state of identity politics in contemporary Wales,” said an awards spokesperson.

The shortlists will be announced at an event at the bookshop in Aberystwyth Arts Centre on Wednesday, 1 May, and the winners will be announced at a ceremony at the Summer House in Hay Festival on Friday, 24 May.

The £1,000 prize will be used as an advance against e-publication by New Welsh Review under their New Welsh Rarebyte imprint, and the winner will also receive a positive critique by leading literary agent Cathryn Summerhayes at Curtis Brown.

See this week’s south papers for the full story, available in shops and as a digital edition on Wednesday