Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. Her first six books of poetry in Welsh and English were followed by Chaotic Angels (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), which brings together the poems from her three English collections, Parables & Faxes, Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum. Her latest poetry books are A Hospital Odyssey (2010) and Sparrow Tree (2011), both from Bloodaxe.
Her first collection in English, Parables & Faxes (Bloodaxe Books, 1995), won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second, Zero Gravity (Bloodaxe Books, 1998), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry. The BBC made a documentary of Zero Gravity, inspired by her astronaut cousin’s voyage to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Both Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum (Bloodaxe Books, 2003) were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Y Llofrudd Iaith (Barddas, 1999) won the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year Prize and Keeping Mum was shortlisted for the same prize. In 2010 she won a Cholmondeley Award. Sparrow Tree won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012.
Gwyneth Lewis composed the words on the front of Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre. Her other books include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression (Harper Perennial, 2002), shortlisted for the Mind Book of the Year; Two in a Boat (Fourth Estate, 2005), which recounts a voyage made with her husband on a small boat from Cardiff to North Africa; and The Meat Tree: New stories from the Mabinogion (Seren, 2010).
She is a librettist and has written two chamber operas for children, Redflight/Barcud, with music by Richard Chew, and Dolffin, with music by Julian Phillips. She has also written an oratorio, The Most Beautiful Man from the Sea, to music by Orlando Gough and Richard Chew. All were commissioned and performed by Welsh National Opera with amateur singers. Her first stage play, Clytemnestra, was premièred at Sherman Cymru in 2012.
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.