Last Polar Bear on Earth, The

Rhian Elizabeth was born in 1988 in the Rhondda Valley, South Wales, and now lives in Cardiff. Her novel, Six Pounds Eight Ounces (Seren, 2014), was shortlisted for The International Rubery Book Award. She has previously been a winner of The Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award and her poetry was shortlisted for The Bangor Poetry Prize (Northern Ireland). Her fiction and poetry has been published in and by A Fiction Map of Wales, The Lonely Crowd, Cheval 9, Peeking Cat Poetry, The Cardiff Review, The Lampeter Review and Cheval 10 and she has also written for the Institute of Welsh Affairs. In 2017 she was named by The Welsh Agenda as one of Wales’ Rising Stars – one of 30 people working to make Wales better over the next 30 years. She is a Hay Festival Writer at Work. This summer she will travel to Sweden to represent Wales at the Coracle Europe International Literary Residency, along with other chosen writers from Ireland, Sweden and Turkey

Finding out you’ve got a serious illness like multiple sclerosis is a bit like falling in love. you are never quite the same again.when you get your heartbroken, it’s like getting the news that you’re ill. It’s a process of grief and you think your life is over and that you will never move on, but you do. Alternatively, when you become ill and when you fall in love, you are just simply f***ed.