Gwyneth Lewis

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	Photo: © Tim Brett

Biography

Poet Gwyneth Lewis was born in 1959 in Cardiff, Wales. She attended a bilingual school in Pontypridd and studied English at Cambridge University. She studied at Harvard and Columbia, was a Harkness Fellow and worked as a freelance journalist in New York. She returned to Britain and worked in television. In 2001 she was awarded a £75,000 grant by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) to carry out research and to sail to ports that are linked historically with the inhabitants of her native city, Cardiff.

Gwyneth Lewis writes both in Welsh, her first language, and in English. Her first collection written in English, Parables and Faxes (1995), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize (Best First Collection) and won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 1988. Zero Gravity (1998) was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The poems in the collection were inspired by the work of her cousin, Joe Tanner, an astronaut, who worked on the Hubble telescope in 1997. Y Llofrudd Iaith (2000) won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award.  

Her first non-fiction prose book, Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression, the author's account of beating her depression, was published in 2002. It was followed by Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (2005), a sailing memoir.

In 2004, Gwyneth Lewis was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. She wrote the inscription above the Wales Millennium Centre, and has recently written an oratorio, The Most Beautiful Man from the Sea, with music by Richard Chew and Orlando Gough. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the Welsh Academi and a NESTA Fellow. Her most recent book is A Hospital Odyssey (2010), which takes the form of an epic poem about a journey through illness.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Non-fiction, Poetry

Bibliography

Llwybrau bywyd   Urdd Gobaith Cymru, 1977

Ar y groesfford   Urdd Gobaith Cymru, 1978

Sonedau Redsa a Cherddi Eraill   Gomer, 1990

Parables and Faxes   Bloodaxe, 1995

Cyfrif Un Ac Un yn Dri   Barddas, 1996

Zero Gravity   Bloodaxe, 1998

Y Llofrudd Iaith   Barddas, 2000

Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression   Flamingo, 2002

Keeping Mum   (republished in 2005, as 'Chaotic Angels')   Bloodaxe, 2003

Two In A Boat: A Marital Voyage   Fourth Estate, 2005

A Hospital Odyssey   Bloodaxe, 2010

Read about books by Gwyneth Lewis at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Gwyneth Lewis at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1988   Eric Gregory Award

1995   Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize   Parables and Faxes

1995   Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection)   (shortlist)   Parables and Faxes

1998   Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year)   (shortlist)   Zero Gravity

2000   Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award   Y Llofrudd Iaith

2001   National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) Award

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Critical Perspective

Gwyneth Lewis is bilingual in Welsh and English and after being recognised as a poet in English whilst she was studying at Oxford in the early 1980s published a Welsh collection, Sonedau Redsa a Cherddi Eraill (1990) before her English debut Parables and Faxes (1995). Her early poem sequence 'Welsh Espionage' was notable for sustaining its conceit of Welshness as a concept to be smuggled through the lines of the dominant English culture over many formal stanzas, inspired by Auden's early spy-in-the-northern-landscape poems:

'Close shave at the station when I asked my way.
Ticket collector quizzed me: Did I know
The pubs or the chapels better? Got away

With mumbling 'Neither' and then leaving fast.
I mustn't let on that I speak Welsh
Or they're sure to connect me with my past.'

Her poems are high-spirited and sometimes flip over into surrealism. In 'The Hedge', the possession of landscape becomes literal as a hedge which has entwined the narrator pulls up an entire countryside as she struggles to get free. This releases a cascade of glittering description:

'I had brooches of newly built housing schemes

and sequins of coruscating shale;
power-lines crackled as they changed their course
and woodsmoke covered my face like a veil.'

Her second book, Zero Gravity (1998) featured several poems about space flight - she has a cousin who is an astronaut. The mission to repair the Hubble is twinned in the poems with an elegy for Lewis's sister in law, and the conjunction leads to ideas from science such as the Doppler Effect informing an elegy:

'It must be that pain

accelerates something.
Her speeding mind
leaves us in the present,
a long way behind.'

Gwyneth Lewis is a fine essayist, with a wide range of subject matter and a refreshingly in-your-face style. In the essay 'Whose coat is that jacket? Whose hat is that cap' she has written powerfully on translation, especially of the fact that all poetry is translating something.

In 2001 she was the fourth poet to receive a grant (£75,000) from the National Foundation for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). Her project involves a boat trip from Cardiff around the world, especially to places of Welsh interests such as Patagonia, the trip to be written up in prose and verse. Lewis is one of the most interesting poets now writing. She has plenty to write about, an engaging and often provocative attitude, lots of chutzpah and real formal gifts. Peter Porter has said: 'Gwyneth Lewis amounts to a "New Generation" just by herself'.

Peter Forbes, 2002

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Author statement

'I started writing poetry when I was seven years old. It had rained a good deal during a school holiday, preventing us from playing outside, so I decided to write a long poem about the rain instead. Many of my happiest moments since have been spent in the same way - sitting at a table, chewing the top of a pen, trying to let words take me where they want to.

I think of writing as being a third eye which helps me to make sense of my life. Without it, and the routes it offers me into my subconscious, I seem to live less richly and certainly less wisely. Poetry requires an act of deep listening - to yourself, your body, to words and, even, to the silence which surrounds them. I don't know what I'd do without it.'

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Flamingo c/o HarperCollins Publishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road London  W6 8JB England Tel: +44 20 8741 7070 Fax: +44 20 8307 4440 http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

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