Singer-songwriter Fflur Dafydd is the first Oxfam Emerging Writer of the Year. The first award of its kind to be offered at the Guardian Hay Festival, the prize was announced on Saturday 23 May at the festivals Sky Arts awards dinner. Only just turned thirty last August and about to be married this August, Fflurs first novel in English, Twenty Thousand Saints has received fantastic and wide-ranging reviews including in The Guardian, Diva magazine, Western Mail and Prospect magazine, where it was 2009s pick of the year. Hay Festival director Peter Florence has been a consistent and vocal advocate of the novel, describing it as, The most compelling novel Ive read in years; a love story, a thriller, and a profound meditation on language and identity... [Fflur Dafydd ranks alongside] Sarah Waters, Kate Atkinson and Zoe Heller [in representing] the blossoming and triumphs of a whole new generation of young women writers.

Presenting the award, together with a very rare first edition hardback copy of Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird, David McCullough, Director of Oxfam said, We are very happy to work in partnership with the Hay Festival this year and congratulate Fflur Dafydd on being the first winner of our Emerging Writer of the Year Award.

Author Fflur Dafydd said, Its quite special for others to recognise in a thriller set on Bardsey island the deeper comments I wanted to make about privacy, loss, disillusion, language and identity. The Hay festival has been incredibly supportive of my writing, and warm thanks to Oxfam too!

Fflur has been publishing since she was twenty, and is a veteran of the international music and literary festival circuit. Under her belt are residencies in Helsinki, as well as performances in Croatia; Mantova, Italy; Chicago; Ireland, and the Netherlands. Fflur also took part in two sell-out events at the Hay Festival, reading with Dylan Thomas Prize Winner Nam Le, and the writer and broadcaster Jon Gower. She will now embark on a reading tour to promote Twenty Thousand Saints , appearing at the Latitude Festival, Suffolk and the Writers Reunion in Finland.

Set on Bardsey Island, the novel looks at how young women, starved of men as the boats stop bringing them, start to turn to each other for solace. It is Fflurs second novel to be set on Bardsey as the fruit of a six-week stint as writer-in-residence on the island in 2002. The first was the Welsh-language Atyniad, which was awarded the prestigious prose medal at the National Eisteddfod in 2006.

Twenty Thousand Saints is as much a lyrical romance as it is a literary novel with important things to say about the media, privacy and intrusion, the environment, discovery and national identity. Playing with cultural myths of islands, from The Lord of the Flies to Im a Celebrity Get me Out of Here, Dafydd sets up the cameras eye as witness and catalyst to how the islands female visitors degenerate one summer from delighted faux-primitivism (compost toilets!) to jungle-fever.

An unusual combination of straight and gay romance, mystery, rebellious nuns and politics (with a dry humour akin to Bernice Rubens), Twenty Thousand Saints is beautifully written with serious purpose. It is also a political book about post-devolution Wales, though that is one message that never submerges the novels lyricism or integrity of character.

Fflur Dafydd lectures in Creative Writing at Swansea University and lives in Carmarthen.