Gavin & Stacey's Ruth Jones gets award at Hay Festival
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.
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Her website is out of date, her Instagram is dead and her Facebook hasn't been updated since 2023. Still, the cracks keep on coming. 'Wonderful gallery!' begins one sarcastic Google review. 'They are all so nice! On the way out, a thin, curly, gray haired lady whispered that she could get me a Picasso for $500. I talked her down to $325! Paint was barely dry! It looks great, hanging over the cat litter box!' Nevertheless, Avrich says he's taken flak for not going even harder on Freedman. 'I screened the film for Alec Baldwin,' said Avrich of the actor who, in 2010, bought a $190,000 phony painting by Ross Bleckner from a different unscrupulous dealer. 'He yelled at me as only Alec Baldwin does, saying, 'You treat her like a schoolgirl that did something wrong during recess. You have to be tougher on her,'' Avrich recalled. 'But that wasn't my role. I wasn't making a '60 Minutes' episode, or being Michael Moore. I let her tell her story. The world can decide where things shake out. Where she sits in this is a debate that rages on.'
