Sian Hughes

Siân Hughes is a poet and novelist who lives in her home village of Tilston in South Cheshire, where her first novel, Pearl, is set. Pearl is a contemporary novel inspired by the medieval poem of grief and mourning by the same poet as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Pearl was published by Indigo Press in 2023 and long-listed for the Booker prize.  

Before moving into fiction, Siân Hughes published poetry, with her first collection The Missing (Salt, 2008) winning the Seamus Heaney award containing the winning poem from the Arvon International Poetry prize in 2006.  

Like most writers Siân has had many other day jobs, and worked for most of her adult life in Further Education in Oxfordshire. Before that she was Education Officer for The Poetry Society, where she established the Young National Poetry Competition over twenty years ago. She has run writing and publishing projects for asylum-seekers in Manchester and Oxford, as well as running creative-writing groups for Age UK, Headway, Restore and other charities. Since 2022 she has been running a small community bookshop in Malpas, Cheshire, and volunteering with a charity called Poetry Whitchurch promoting creative writing opportunities in her local area.  

In May 2026 a second novel inspired by the works of the Gawain poet, Purity, will be published by Indigo Press, this time set in the Black Country and based on the life of a dry-cleaner called Steffie.