Gwyneth Lewis on BBC Radio 4's The Verb
‘One of the most exhilaratingly gifted poets of her generation.’ – M. Wynn Thomas, The Guardian
Gywneth Lewis' sixth collection in English, First Rain in Paradise, is published by Bloodaxe in March 2025.
In this new collection, Gwyneth Lewis’s highly inventive poems trace an interior landscape carved out by the trauma of childhood emotional abuse through subsequent chronic ill health and towards a hard-won resurrection. These accounts of living in and emerging from the dark wrestle with the angel of language. Suffering does not preclude humour and may, in fact, require it, in poems written from the shadows but committed to the light. Gwyneth Lewis has won wide acclaim for her versatile and varied writing across genres, most notably in her award-winning poetry in both English and Welsh. This book shows a deepening of her technical, imaginative and intellectual resources which are challenged and exercised to the full. The poems map uneasy terrains with realism and – most importantly – with joy.
Gywneth Lewis' first six books of poetry in Welsh and English were followed by Chaotic Angels: Poems in English (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.
Gywneth Lewis composed the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, opened in 2004. She was Wales’s National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. 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.
Her prose 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).
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INTERVIEW WITH GWYNETH LEWIS ON BBC RADIO 4
The Verb, BBC Radio 4, Sunday 12 January 2025, 5.10pm
Welsh poet and writer Gywneth Lewis was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s The Verb on 12 January 2025. She was speaking to host Ian McMillan about her recent memoir, Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (University of Wales Press, 2024). Gwyneth read a section from her memoir in which she writes about the composition of her first poem at the age of seven.
Gwyneth also read a poem from her forthcoming Bloodaxe collection First Rain in Paradise, which is out on 27 March, and which explores some of the same difficult territory as her recent memoir. The poem was ‘Missing’ from the opening ‘Spiderings’ sequence. The poem was first published in PN Review, which also ran an interview with Gwyneth in their Summer 2024 issue. Details below.
‘Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tells Ian McMillan about the influence of poetry on his writing, and shares poems written by his own mother. Ian also explores the influence of a very competitive mother on the life and poetry of former National Poet of Wales Gwyneth Lewis.’
Available on BBC Sounds until 11 February 2025. Gwyneth is introduced at 23:35 and reads the poem from 32:50. She contributes to the conversation at other points too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0026v0r
PN Review 278, Volume 50 Number 6, July-August 2024
An interview with Gwyneth Lewis was published in the Summer 2024 edition of PN Review, along with her ‘Spiderings’ sequence from her forthcoming sixth collection in English, First Rain in Paradise.
Gwyneth Lewis in Conversation. Available online by subscription.
https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=11746
The poems are available in full online by subscription.
https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=11745
A piece by Gwyneth Lewis about the background to her memoir Nightshade Mother featured in The Guardian of 24 September 2024. Read online here.
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FORTHCOMING ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT
Online launch reading by Gwyneth Lewis, Kate Potts & Arundhathi Subramaniam
Tuesday 25 March 2025, 7pm GMT (Live on YouTube)
Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Gwyneth Lewis, Kate Potts and Arundhathi Subramaniam. All three poets will be celebrating the publication of our three new March titles by reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. Watch live or later via YouTube.
Gwyneth Lewis reads two poems
Gwyneth Lewis reads two poems from Chaotic Angels: Poems in English (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), 'Welsh Espionage' and 'Mother Tongue'. This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).
[15 January 2025]
