Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. She composed the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, which opened in 2004. 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 March 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), and Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (Calon, 2024), a Guardian Book of the Year choice. With Rowan Williams she translated The Book of Taliesin (2019) for Penguin Classics. Parables & Faxes won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival First Collection Prize 1995, and Zero Gravity was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 1998. Her Welsh language collection Y Llofrudd Iaith (Barddas, 2000) won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award in 2000, and Keeping Mum was shortlisted for the English language poetry category of the same award in 2004. Both Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. 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, later 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
