A former Wales Book of the Year finalist and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Sophie Buchaillard is both writer and educator. Born in Paris, living in South Wales, her work is deeply shaped by migration, multilingualism, and an ethics of social witnessing. Her overall practice is informed by lessons from transnational histories, as much as it is attentive to marginal experiences in contemporary, urban, Wales. Critics situate her writing within debates about belonging, inherited trauma, and the political responsibilities of the writer.

Writing aesthetics and form

Sophie writes across genres to explore three key concerns: Belonging and unbelonging - her characters and speakers often suspended between languages, nations, and social categories. Trauma, both personal and historical, is treated not as spectacle but as a force shaping memory, behaviour, and silence. Finally, Language itself - its failures, violences, and possibilities - becomes a recurring subject, particularly in relation to dehumanisation and political rhetoric.

In her writing, Sophie favours structures that resist closure. Whether through fragmentation, polyphony, or open‑ended imagery, her work refuses the consolations of narrative mastery. This aesthetic aligns with her ethical stance: the past cannot be neatly resolved, and literature’s task is not to soothe but to bear witness.

She is the author of This Is Not Who We Are, Assimilation and the poetry collection Painting Over the Cracks.

Academic research

Sophie is Associate Tutor at Cardiff Metropolitan University, where she teaches on the Critical Approaches and Publishing and the Digital Humanities modules. She was awarded a Senior Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy in 2023, for her work making education in Wales more inclusive. Previously, she taught Creative Writing and Political Science at Cardiff University.

Between Cultures: Travel Writing, Identity and the Global Novel, her PhD in Creative and Critical Writing (Cardiff University), focused on the Anglo-French colonial and gendered history of travel writing, its ongoing influence on today’s polarised world, and the positive role previously silenced voices subverting the genre can play in articulating a future built on what she coins our ‘identité-mosaic’.

Sophie is the former Book Reviews Editor for the academic journal Intersectional Perspectives: Identity, Culture, and Society (Cardiff University Press)

Literary Contribution

According to critics, Buchaillard occupies a space within contemporary Welsh writing while also exceeding national categorisation. Her work contributes to a growing body of literature that rethinks Wales as a multilingual, migratory, and globally entangled space. At the same time, her engagement with international histories places her in dialogue with broader European and postcolonial literary traditions.

Nurturing Creative Communities

Sophie believes in the power of a creative practice to strengthen communities, locally and across borders.

She serves on the Translation Board for The Other Side of Hope, a magazine that publishes refugee and immigrant writers and contributes to the Advisory Board of Folding Rock magazine, a new literary magazine which mission is to showcase Welsh talent nationally and internationally. She is a member of the Society of Authors Cymru Committee.

Sophie is the founder of Creative Circles Cymru, a voluntary platform that encourages authors based in Wales to support one another and facilitates workshops and collaboration between writers, artists and makers across Wales.

Other works

Prizes and distinction

Nominated as Committee Member Society of Authors Cymru October 2025

Judge for the Swansea and District Writer Circle Competition December 2024

Shortlisted for the International Bridport Poetry Award 2024

Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2023

Shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2023

Shortlisted for the Rhys Davies Fiction Prize 2023

Shortlisted for the Chwarae Tag Womenspire Award 2017

Talks, panels and other events

19 November 2025: Crossing Boundaries: on becoming a writer, with Sophie Buchaillard, Penarth Library Creative Evening

6 November 2025: Guest speaker Society of Authors Swansea Group

15 October 2025: Sophie Buchaillard and Guests, an evening of poetry and music, with Siobhan McCrudden and Mab Jones. Penarth Pier Pavilion.

13 September 2025: Travel Writing and the Anthropocene, Creative Bridges - Lapidus International Annual Conference.

10 April 2025: Launch of Meredith Miller’s new novel Cold Grace, hosted by Sophie Buchaillard and the Swansea Cultural Institute.

6 March 2025: ‘Strong Female Characters’ in conversation with Meredith Miller and Catrin Kean, hosted by Honno Press, Waterstone’s Cardiff

4 March 2025: Sophie chaired a panel on Creative Facilitation hosted by Literature Wales, alongside Taylor Edmonds and Sian Hughes.

7 November 2024: ’Voyages and Vagabondages’ in conversation with Richard Gwyn, Swansea Cultural Institute

2 November 2024: ‘The role of the writer in a polarised world’ Panel with Özgür Uyanik and Carole Burns, Llantwit Major

27 May 2024: Hay Festival: in conversation with Francesca Reece and Tiffany Murray

28 April 2024: Llandeilo Literature Festival: in conversation with Meredith Miller

13 March 2024: ‘A World of Difference’ Hay Festival: After Hours, Wales Millennium Centre

9 March 2024: ’Intrusive Noises and Uncomfortable Silences: deconstructing the experience of otherness through sounds and objects - a three dimensional poem’, Turner House - Penarth

Contribution to anthologies

‘Tangled thoughts from a Migrant Mother’, in Women’s Wales? Edited by Emma Schofield, Parthian 2024.

‘Revolving Doors’, in An Open Door: New Travel Writing for a Precarious Century, Edited by Steven Lovatt, Parthian 2022.

You Tube videos

Hay Festival After Hours Event in the Wales Millennium Centre, in March 2023
https://youtu.be/OLgUUVYKvcc?si=LxRrSaEcKUxDfuzH

Sophie Buchaillard in conversation with Janet Laugharne https://youtu.be/r8oeIZkAHWQ?si=qZuMWzoW1UFISEsy

Writing Wales: New Perspectives with Katie Munnik and Sophie Buchaillard

https://youtu.be/dA8ed-yXiXM

Critical Reviews

Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira - Meander Magazine February 2026

Do It Yourself: Making Political Theatre by Common/Wealth - Nation Cymru October 2025

Demand the Impossible Nation Cymru October 2025

The Crazy Truth by Gemma June Howell Nation Cymru July 2024

Unspeakable Beauty by Georgia Carys Williams, Nation Cymru, May 2024

Sarn Helen by Tom Bullough, Modron Magazine, issue 2 (April 2023)

Talking Translation | In Conversation with Amaia Gabantxo in Wales Arts Review (3.08.2022)

Critical Essays

‘Light Expectations’, in Folding Rock Issue 2, July 2025

‘Colonialism, Genocide and the UK-Rwanda Deal’ in Nation Cymru, March 2024

‘The Pyrenees’ in Plots & Plants in Modron Magazine, January 2024

‘Imagined travels: a sea horizon journey’ in The Sea Horizon: Part I in Wales Arts Review, November 2023

What have we learned from the Rwandan genocide? in the Welsh Agenda - Institute of Welsh Affairs, August 2022

Developing Credible and Complex Characters in Writers & Artists, June 2022

The Colonial Dynamics of Priti Patel’s Rwanda Deal in Byline Times, May 2022

Tangled Thoughts from a Migrant Mother in Wales Arts Review, April 2022

Poetry: A Lockdown Journey in The Friday Poem, March 2022

Together and Apart in ‘Anthology One: Together & Apart’, Square Wheel Press, August 2020

Rwanda, the 1994 Genocide: Lessons of Literature in Wales Arts Review, May 2020

Assimilation – Such a brilliant book to travel with and to read in those ‘in between’ places. A hymn to the complicated nature of home and the somehow serendipitous yet inevitable ways we find it. I loved this scrapbook of memory and longing.

Caryl Lewis, author of Drift (Winner Wales Book of the Year 2023)
This is Not Who We Are – Sophie Buchaillard’s novel is a stark and terrifying reminder that only the most fragile screen separates the familiar from the abyss, the comforts of home from the most obscene and extreme violence. Richard Gwyn, author of the Colour of a Dog Running Awa

Richard Gwyn, author of the Colour of a Dog Running Away
Assimilation – Spanning continents and slipping between time, this sophisticated and affecting novel shows how the secrets of the past never quite disappear, casting long, long shadows over the present day.

Jon Gower, author of The Turning Tide: A Biography of the Irish Sea
This is Not Who We Are – A multi-layered and very moving novel about the Rwandan genocide and the culpability of the French government. The central idea of pen friends whose letter-writing is disrupted by war feels original and offers a fruitful way into this complex subject matter. An excellent debut and I can't wait to see what Sophie Buchaillard writes next.

Katherine Stansfield, author of The Visitor and The Magpie Tree

Other works

Prizes and distinction

Talks, panels and other events

Contribution to anthologies

You Tube videos

Assimilation – Such a brilliant book to travel with and to read in those ‘in between’ places. A hymn to the complicated nature of home and the somehow serendipitous yet inevitable ways we find it. I loved this scrapbook of memory and longing.

This is Not Who We Are – Sophie Buchaillard’s novel is a stark and terrifying reminder that only the most fragile screen separates the familiar from the abyss, the comforts of home from the most obscene and extreme violence. Richard Gwyn, author of the Colour of a Dog Running Awa

Assimilation – Spanning continents and slipping between time, this sophisticated and affecting novel shows how the secrets of the past never quite disappear, casting long, long shadows over the present day.