James Friel's most recent novel, The Higher Realm is available now in the UK (click here to order). It won the 2006 Ilura Press Fiction Quest Prize and was launched at the Melbourne Writers Festival in September, 2007. The UK launch of 'The Higher Realm' will be the first event in this year's Liverpool WOW Writing on the Wall Festival.

A collection of his short stories will be published by bluechrome in 2008, and his next novel, A Posthumous Affair, will be published in the US in 2009. His other novels include Left of North, Taking the Veil and Careless Talk.

He is Programme Leader for the MA in Writing at the Centre for Writing, Liverpool John Moores University, and Visiting Writer at L'Universite de Rouen, and at L'Universite de Francois Rabelais in Tours. He tutors regularly for both the Arvon Foundation and at Ty Newydd: in 2008 at the Hurst he will co tutor courses with Tahmima Anam, and with Alicia Stubbersfield - and at Ty Newydd in 2008, he will co-tutor with Clare Shaw.

He has won a Betty Trask Prize, an Authors’ Foundation Award, a Welsh Arts Council Bursary, a storySouth Million Writers Award, and was nominated for the Mail on Sunday/ John Llewellyn Rhys Prize Fiction Prize. His work has appeared in Blithe House Quarterly, Etchings, Pretext, Boomerang, The Writers' Workbook, Time Out, Harpers & Queen, Fable, The Universe, In the Red, Cercles,High Life as well as on BBC Radio 3 and 4's Front Row and Kaleidoscope. His radio adaptations include The Remains of the Day for the BBC Radio 4; David Hare’s Saigon: Year of the Cat; Balzac’s Cousin Bette, as well as Villette, As I Lay Dying, Iris Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeat and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow for Radio 3, and A Pale View of Hills for BBC Radio 4.