Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s National Poet from 2005-06. She wrote the six-foot-high words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre, which have become an icon for Wales. She’s published nine books of poetry in Welsh and English and two of non-fiction – Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book About Depression (2002) and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (2005). Her most recent publication is a translation, with Rowan Williams, of The Book of Taliesin (Penguin Classics, 2019). She’s freelance and has written plays for stage and radio. Her first television screenplay won the BAFTA Wales Best Drama Award. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a recipient of a Cholmondely Award from the Society of Authors. In 2014 she was Bain-Swiggett Visiting Lecturer of Poetry and English at Princeton University. She’s a faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English in Middlebury, Vermont, where she was 2016 Robert Frost Chair of Literature. Gwyneth was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Honours List for services to literature and to mental health. Her new memoir, Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling, is due from Calon in September 2024.
