Gwyneth Lewis events and workshops
‘One of the most exhilaratingly gifted poets of her generation.’ – M. Wynn Thomas, Guardian
Gywneth Lewis' sixth collection in English, First Rain in Paradise, is published by Bloodaxe in March 2025. In this new collection, Gwyneth Lewis’s highly inventive poems trace an interior landscape carved out by the trauma of childhood emotional abuse through subsequent chronic ill health and towards a hard-won resurrection. These accounts of living in and emerging from the dark wrestle with the angel of language. Suffering does not preclude humour and may, in fact, require it, in poems written from the shadows but committed to the light. Gwyneth Lewis has won wide acclaim for her versatile and varied writing across genres, most notably in her award-winning poetry in both English and Welsh. This book shows a deepening of her technical, imaginative and intellectual resources which are challenged and exercised to the full. The poems map uneasy terrains with realism and – most importantly – with joy.
Gywneth Lewis' first six books of poetry in Welsh and English were followed by Chaotic Angels: Poems in English (2005) from Bloodaxe, which brings together the poems from her English collections, Parables & Faxes, Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum, and by A Hospital Odyssey (2010), and Sparrow Tree (2011), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012.
Gywneth Lewis composed the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, opened in 2004. She was Wales’s National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. 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 and teaches regularly for Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English in the US. She was Artist in Residence at Balliol College, Oxford in 2023-25; she did her doctorate there and was elected an Honorary Fellow. 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.
Her prose books include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (Flamingo, 2002), Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate, 2005), The Meat Tree: new stories from the Mabinogion (Seren, 2010), Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (University of Wales Press, 2024) and The Poetry Detective: Writing and Reading Poetry Through Fear (Princeton University Press, 2025).
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Gywneth Lewis was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s The Verb on 12 January 205. She was speaking to host Ian McMillan about her recent memoir, Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (University of Wales Press, 2024). Gwyneth also read a poem from her forthcoming Bloodaxe collection First Rain in Paradise, published 27 March 2025, and which explores some of the same difficult territory as her recent memoir. The poem read was ‘Missing’ from the opening ‘Spiderings’ sequence. The poem was first published in the Summer 2024 issue of PN Review, which also ran an interview with Gwyneth.
Available on BBC Sounds until 11 February 2025. Gwyneth is introduced at 23:35. She contributes to the conversation at other points too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0026v0r
ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT
Online launch reading by Gwyneth Lewis, Kate Potts & Arundhathi Subramaniam
Tuesday 25 March 2025, 7pm GMT (Live on YouTube)
Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Gwyneth Lewis, Kate Potts and Arundhathi Subramaniam. All three poets will be celebrating the publication of our three new March titles by reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. Sign up for reminder emails here: https://buytickets.at/bloodaxebooks/1534704
Watch live or later via YouTube.
WRITING COURSE AT MONIACK MHOR
28 April – 3 May 2025
Animals, Beasts and Monsters
Moniack Mhor, Kiltarlity, Inverness-shire, IV4 7HT
Join tutors Gwyneth Lewis & fellow Bloodaxe poet Pascale Petit for this week-long writing course at Moniack Mhor. Guest Reader: Jay Griffiths.
More details and booking here.
PAST EVENTS AND RECORDINGS
Gwyneth Lewis reads two poems
Gwyneth Lewis reads two poems from Chaotic Angels: Poems in English (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), 'Welsh Espionage' and 'Mother Tongue'. This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).
[15 January 2025]
