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 collections include Sparrow Tree (2011), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year); Parables & Faxes, which won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival First Collection Prize 1995; and Zero Gravity, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 1998. First Rain in Paradise was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025. 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. With Rowan Williams she translated The Book of Taliesin (2019) for Penguin Classics. 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. She lives in Cardiff and teaches regularly for Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English in the US. Author photo © Edward Brown
This biography of Gwyneth Lewis is taken from the Bloodaxe Books website.
