Gwyneth Lewis

Gwyneth has published nine books of poetry in Welsh and English. Chaotic Angels (2005) brings together poems from her first three English collections. Parables & Faxes (1995), won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward. Her second collection, Zero Gravity (1998), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry. The BBC made a documentary of the poem, inspired by her astronaut cousin's voyage to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. A Hospital Odyssey (2010) is an epic poem about a patient and carer’s phantasmagoric journey through illness. Sparrow Tree (2011) won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award.

Gwyneth's first non-fiction book Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (2002), was short listed for the Mind Book of the Year. Her adaptation of the play for BBC Radio 4 won a Mental Health in the Media award. Her second, Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (2005) recounts a two-handed voyage made with her husband from Cardiff to North Africa. 

Her first television screenplay, Y Streic a Fi ('The Strike and Me'), commissioned by S4C, won the 2015 BAFTA Wales for Best Drama.

Gwyneth is a librettist and dramatist and has written two chamber operas for children and an oratorio, all commissioned and performed by Welsh National Opera. Clytemnestra was commissioned, performed and published by the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff. Stardust: A Love Story, which explains the basic principles of particle physics, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

In 2006 she was Writer in Residence at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University and in 2013 was commissioned to write poems by CERN. Gwyneth was a Harkness Fellow 1982-85 and studied at Harvard University and the Graduate Writing Division of Columbia University in the City of New York. 2008-09 she was the Mildred Londa Wiseman Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University and in 2009-10 Joint Sica/Stanford Humanities Center Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University. In the same year, she was given a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award recognizing a body of work and achievement of distinction.

In 2014, Gwyneth was the Bain-Swiggett Visiting Lecturer of Poetry and English at Princeton University. For the last three years she has been Faculty at Bread Loaf School of English, Vermont, USA and was the 2016 Robert Frost Chair of Literature. In 2020 Gwyneth was elected Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

She and Rowan Williams published a translation of the Book of Taliesin (Penguin Classics, 2019). It was named by the Wales Arts Review as one of the Books of the Decade.


Reviews

‘One of the most exhilaratingly gifted poets of her generation’ – M. Wynn Thomas in The Guardian

‘Felicitous, urbane, heartbreaking, the poems of Gwyneth Lewis form a universe whose planets use language for oxygen and thus are inhabitable’ – Joseph Brodsky

‘The fact that Gwyneth Lewis writes in Welsh and English is central to the issues she addresses…Lewis is not always easy to locate as a poet, and in part this is because of her originality and her refusal to easily fall prey to current trends or trendiness. Her poetic lineage includes poets such as George Herbert, Joseph Brodsky and perhaps most prominently, W.H. Auden. And this is nowhere more evident than in her ability to resolve through poetry complex philosophical ideas, and to make the creative marriages of words and ideas that rhyme allows’ – Deryn Rees-Jones on Chaotic Angels, PBS Bulletin Bibliography

Poetry

Sonedau Redsa a Cherddi Eraill, Gomer Press, Llandysul, 1990
Parables and Faxes, Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland, 1995
Cyfrif Un Ac Un yn Dri, Barddas, Wales, 1996
Zero Gravity, Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland, 1998
Y Llofrudd Iaith, Barddas, Wales, 2000
Keeping Mum, Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland, 2003
Tair Mewn Un, Barddas, Aberystwyth, 2005
Chaotic Angels, Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, 2005
A Hospital Odyssey, Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, 2009
Sparrow Tree, Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, 2011
Treiglo, Barddas, Aberystwyth, 2017

Prose

The Meat Tree, Seren, 2010
Advantages of an Older Man, Seren, 2014

Non-fiction

Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression, Flamingo, 2002
Two In A Boat: A Marital Voyage, Fourth Estate, London, 2005
Quantum Poetics: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, 2015

Translations

Y Storm, translation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Barddas, 2012
The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain, translated by Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams, Penguin Classics, 2019

Links

Gwyneth Lewis' website

The Guardian
An article by Gwyneth Lewis on growing up with Welsh and English.

The Wales Millennium Centre
Gwyneth Lewis’ public poem for the WMC.

• Gwyneth  interviewed by Hilton Oberzinger in How I Write series, Stanford University, 2010

[first published on November 1, 2007, updated November 11, 2020]