Sophie Buchaillard is a writer, travel writing academic, and educator. She believes in the power of words and artistic collaborations to change lives and foster strong communities for the future. She has written two novels, a dozen essays and a poetry collection. She was a Bridport Poetry Prize and Wales Book of the Year finalist in 2024 and 2023 respectively. Sophie created Creative Circles Cymru, a community platform to support writers in Wales through mentoring, workshops, and advocacy.
A former Hay Festival Writer at Work, Sophie writes about belonging through fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Her debut novel, This Is Not Who We Are (Seren Books) follows two women who corresponded as teenagers during the 1994 Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, and explores the banal route to dehumanisation. Her second novel, Assimilation (Honno, 2024), examines how travel, memory, and family stories influence our identities, often clashing with the fixed ideas we inherited from the nation-state. Her emerging poetry Painting over the cracks (Lucent Dreaming, 2025), retraces a thirty-year journey through trauma and celebrates the value of friendship and community.
She has contributed creative essays to three collections: on migration and motherhood in Woman’s Wales? (Parthian, 2024); on movement and identity in An Open Door: New travel Writing for a Precarious Century (Parthian, 2022); and on self and belonging in Together and Apart (Square Wheel Press, 2021). Her other creative essays have appeared in various literary magazines, including Folding Rock, Wales Arts Review, Modron Magazine, and The Friday Poem and span from language to nature, food to poetry. She has written political commentaries for the ByLine Times, Nation.Cymru and The Agenda.
Sophie is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Associate Tutor at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University where she taught for five years, alongside being Book Reviews Editor for the academic journal Intersectional Perspectives: Identity, Culture, and Society (Cardiff University Press).
Her thesis, Between Cultures: Travel Writing, Identity and the Global Novel, focused on the problematic past of travel writing, its impact on our sense of identity today, and how the genre can be subverted to contribute to contemporary debates and give a voice to the silenced.
She serves on the Translation Board for The Other Side of Hope, a magazine that publishes refugee and immigrant writers. She is a native French speaker who has lived in Wales for 25 years; on the SoA Cymru Committee and as Advisory Board member of Folding Rock Magazine.
Find out more at: www.sophiebuchaillard.com