Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. Her first six books of poetry in Welsh and English were followed by Chaotic Angels (2005) from Bloodaxe, which brings together the poems from her English collections, Parables & Faxes, Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum, and by A Hospital Odyssey (2010), and Sparrow Tree (2011), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012. Her sixth collection in English, First Rain in Paradise, is published by Bloodaxe in 2025. Her other books include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (Flamingo, 2002), Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate, 2005), The Meat Tree: new stories from the Mabinogion (Seren, 2010), Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (University of Wales Press, 2024) and The Poetry Detective: Writing and Reading Poetry Through Fear (Princeton University Press, 2025). With Rowan Williams she translated The Book of Taliesin (2019) for Penguin Classics. Zero Gravity won the Welsh Arts Council’s Book of the Year in 1999 and her collection in Welsh, Y Llofrudd Iaith the same prize the following year. Both Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Gwyneth Lewis composed the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, opened in 2004. In 2014 she dramatised her book-length poem A Hospital Odyssey for the BBC, broadcast on Radio 4's Afternoon Drama, and delivered her Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, published in Quantum Poetics (Bloodaxe Books, 2015). She lives in Cardiff and teaches regularly for Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English in the US. She was Artist in Residence at Balliol College, Oxford in 2023-25; she did her doctorate there and was elected an Honorary Fellow. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010 for a distinguished body of writing, and in 2022 she was awarded an MBE for her services to literature and mental health.
Author photo: Edward Brown
