Gavin & Stacey’s Ruth Jones gets award

Actress and writer Ruth Jones has been awarded this year’s Hay Festival medal for drama.

The Gavin and Stacey co-creator was honoured in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, where she was speaking about her new novel.

War Horse author Michael Morpurgo won the fiction medal, while British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak won the medal for prose.

“We are honoured to celebrate three exceptional storytellers,” said Hay Festival chief executive Julie Finch, who said the three winners had “each done much to push the boundaries of contemporary writing and spread the joy of stories here and around the world”.

Jones, from Bridgend, writes about finding joy in unlikely connections in her new book, By Your Side.

Morpurgo is one of UK’s best-known children’s authors, writing more than150 books and serving as Children’s Laureate.

Shafak’s most recent novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, is the story of three lives – in Victorian London, 2014 Turkey and 2018 London – connected by a single drop of water.