Writer. Cultural Leader. Connector.

I’m Sophie Buchaillard—Head of Arts at Arts & Business Cymru, writer and founder of Creative Circles Cymru.

My work sits at the intersection of creative practice, strategy and collaboration, exploring how the arts can shape more connected and sustainable ways of living and working.

What I do

My work moves between practice and structure, between individual experience and collective systems.

Cultural Leadership

At Arts & Business Cymru, I work across Wales to support the development of the arts sector, building relationships between artists, organisations and the business community, and contributing to the long-term conditions in which creative work can thrive.

Creative Practice

As a writer, I explore questions of belonging, migration and the ethics of representation. I am interested in the tensions between language and experience—what can be said, and what resists articulation.

Sector Development

Through Creative Circles Cymru and my teaching, I support artists and organisations through mentoring, collaboration and shared learning, with a focus on sustaining creative practice over time.

My Approach

I am drawn to the spaces where different worlds meet—between artists and institutions, creativity and strategy, language and lived experience.

My work is concerned with connection: how relationships are built, how understanding is shaped, and how ideas move into action.

At its core, it is about creating the conditions in which people and practices can flourish.

Writer bio

Sophie Buchaillard is a writer and cultural practitioner based in South Wales. She is the author of This Is Not Who We Are, Assimilation, and the poetry collection Painting Over the Cracks. Her work moves across genres, exploring questions of belonging, language and memory, and the uneasy spaces between them.

She holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University, where her research examined the colonial and gendered histories of travel writing and their afterlives in contemporary narratives of identity. Her writing has been shortlisted for several prizes, including Wales Book of the Year.

Alongside her literary practice, she works at the intersection of the arts and public life as Head of Arts at Arts & Business Cymru, and teaches at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She is the founder of Creative Circles Cymru, a platform supporting writers and artists 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

‘Monique’s Kefta’s with a Welsh Twist, in Hearth Food, Edited by Faaeza Jasdanwalla-Williams and Rebecca Parfitt, Honno 2026.

‘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