Gwyneth Lewis

Poet Gwyneth Lewis was born in 1959 in Cardiff, Wales. She attended a bilingual school in Pontypridd and studied English at Cambridge University. She furthered her studies at Harvard and Columbia, was a Harkness Fellow, and worked as a freelance journalist in New York. She returned to Britain and worked in television. In 2001 she was awarded a grant by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) to sail to ports linked historically with her native city, Cardiff. Gwyneth Lewis writes both in Welsh, her first language, and in English. Her first collection written in English, Parables and Faxes (Bloodaxe, 1995), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize (Best First Collection) and won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 1988. Zero Gravity (Bloodaxe, 1998) was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection) and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The poems in the collection were inspired by work on the Hubble telescope. Y Llofrudd Iaith (The Language Murderer, Barddas, 2000) won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award. Her first non-fiction book, Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression, was published in 2002 - a remarkable book on depression.  Keeping Mum (Bloodaxe) was published in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year.  In 2004 Lewis was named as one of the Poetry Book Society’s ‘Next Generation’ poets.  She was appointed Wales’s first National Poet from 2005-6 and she also composed the inscription that appears above the Wales Millennium Centre.  Her most recent publication, Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate, 2005) tells of a voyage she took with her husband in a small boat from Cardiff to North Africa.

Read more about Gwyneth Lewis here or on her personal website.

Watch a video of Gwyneth Lewis reading here