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Gillian Clarke, who became National Poet of Wales in 2008, will read from her work, and tell us about the poet’s life, and how the stories of women are woven into so much of what she writes:

“…Or looking at the hills she looked at too.
I find her broken crocks, digging her garden.
What else do we share, but being women?”
(From Marged)

As well as many volumes of poetry, Gillian has recently published At the Source, which fuses poetry with memoir and nature writing – inspired by her life on a smallholding in Ceredigion. She believes that Wales offers a tremendous heritage to a word-lover: “Welsh, …repository of earliest British poetry and mythology, yet fit and fine for the 21st century; English, word-magpie and lingua franca, …its vocabulary taken and absorbed for over a thousand years from so many tongues, beginning with Welsh.”

For more information go to the website here: www.monmouthwomensfestival.co.uk