Gwyneth Lewis – författare

In her forties Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis decided to trade in her landlubber life – a nice house in Cardiff and a sensible job at the BBC – for life aboard a small yacht with her husband Leighton, a former bosun with the Merchant Navy and now in his mid-sixties."We bought our first sailing boat by accident… She was a twenty-three-foot Intro class racer called Nitro, had a yellow hull and was totally unsuitable for beginners, so we bought her and started to learn how to sail in the Bristol Channel. Not long afterwards we were talking about renting out the house and sailing around the world."After buying a yacht – Jameeleh – and teaching themselves to sail it (a process not without its fair share of disasters, from psychotic seas off St. Govan's Head to broken ribs off Ballycotton), Gwyneth and Leighton set out to cross the Atlantic. Unfortunately Gwyneth's incessant seasickness and Leighton's daily deterioration into a moody Captain Bastard were not the only catastrophes with which they had to contend. This strange, stirring and often hilarious account of their voyage is as much a beginner's guide to sailing as it is a portrait of a marriage under the pressure of depression, both medical and meteorological.Gwyneth Lewis's training as a poet and film-maker lends her prose a wonderfully visual quality, and her contagious optimism in the face of inconceivable adversity – not much more could possibly have gone wrong – makes this unique book both touchingly witty and incredibly wise.

One of the most dramatic changes to women's lives in the twentieth century was the advent of safe childbirth, reducing the maternal mortality rate from 1 in 400 births to 1 in 10,000 in just 80 years. The impetus behind this change was the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Death (CEMD), now the world's longest running self-audit of a healthcare service. Here, leading authors in the CEMD tell the story of the pioneering clinicians behind the push for improvements, who received little recognition for their work despite its far-reaching consequences. One by one, the leading causes of maternal death were identified and resolved, from sepsis to safe abortions and more recently psychiatric illness and social and ethnic disparities in healthcare. Global maternal mortality is still too high; this valuable book shows how significant advances in maternal healthcare are possible when clinicians, politicians and the public work together.

One of the most dramatic changes to women's lives in the twentieth century was the advent of safe childbirth, reducing the maternal mortality rate from 1 in 400 births to 1 in 10,000 in just 80 years. The impetus behind this change was the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Death (CEMD), now the world's longest running self-audit of a healthcare service. Here, leading authors in the CEMD tell the story of the pioneering clinicians behind the push for improvements, who received little recognition for their work despite its far-reaching consequences. One by one, the leading causes of maternal death were identified and resolved, from sepsis to safe abortions and more recently psychiatric illness and social and ethnic disparities in healthcare. Global maternal mortality is still too high; this valuable book shows how significant advances in maternal healthcare are possible when clinicians, politicians and the public work together.

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Gwyneth Lewis's three lectures explore the connection linking form and politics with the content of poetry while exploring how each of these changes our understanding of time. She argues that the poet steers a path between making music and making sense - not at the level of the line, but in the deep structures of meaning which are poetry's terrain. The accuracy of what they say is just as important as its expression, both for their own well-being and for its worth to the reader. Taken together, her lectures begin to posit not the science in poetry but a science of the art form. 'The Stronger Life': Much has been made of the volatility of poets, which is largely a myth. Because it can be "confessional", poetry is often assumed to be therapeutic, but it can, equally, be toxic. The lives and work of poets are distinct but not unrelated. Using examples from Laura Riding and George Herbert, Gwyneth Lewis argues in this lecture that poets are more, not less resilient than the rest of the population. Looking at her own modern epic, A Hospital Odyssey, she questions how form is essential to health. 'What Country, Friends, is This?': Using Illyria in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as a starting point, this lecture explores language politics and writing, describing how far poets will go to negotiate safe passage between one and the other. Fluent in Welsh and English, Gwyneth Lewis reflects on writing in two opposed traditions at the same time and reflects on what light the work of poets such as Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Anne Carson, among others, throws on the nature of poetry as a whole. 'Quantum Poetics': Form is the science of poetry. Because of its peculiar relationship with time, poetry's history isn't linear. Language works with a quantum indeterminacy. With special reference to the early Welsh tradition's extreme formalism, Gwyneth Lewis discusses in this lecture how what seems like ornament conjures probability waves into being, adding an extra, unheard, dimension to the sound of metre.

First Rain in Paradise is a book about falling. 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.This work refuses to keep pain a secret. Shame is a lurking presence. The book opens with ‘Spiderings’, a gothic horror sequence about the effects of maternal abuse. Then comes a descent into underworlds of debasement and debility. The third, title sequence begins with a 15th-century manuscript depicting the fall of Adam and Eve, the poems presenting a portrait of a drenched, catastrophic landscape, asking how human trauma relates to a fantasy Eden.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.

A light-hearted novella exploring the strange case of a Swansea woman who is apparently possessed by the spirit of Dylan Thomas. Naturally all is not as it seems. The woman meets a rather different Dylan from the one she knows by repute, one who doesn't really fit in with the ghosts of other poets in heaven and is desperate to train himself to join the fitter shades of the long distance runners instead. Her own life, which has been lonely and sad, is completely transformed by the encounter.Fluent and entertaining the story is written with all the confidence and panache you would expect from the former national poet, also a playwright and award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction. Alongside the humour there is a warmth and pathos, and some pithy observations on poets and poetry and the nature of fame.

Archipelago is one of the most important and influential literary magazines of the lasttwenty years. Running to twelve editions, it was edited by Andrew McNeillie, with theassistance later of James McDonald Lockhart, and began as an attempt to reimagine therelationships between the islands of Ireland and Britain. Archipelago has brought togetherestablished and emerging artists in creative conversations that have transformed the studyof islands, coasts and waterways. It journeys from the Shetlands to Cornwall, from theAran Islands to the coast of Yorkshire, tracing the cultures of diverse zones through someof the best in contemporary writing about place and people.This collection gathers poetry, prose and visual art in clusters grouped around the Irishand British archipelago, with contributions from an array of significant artists. It includesnewly commissioned work as well as an interview between Andrew McNeillie andRobert Macfarlane on the development of Archipelago across the years.

Gwyneth Lewis was made National Poet of Wales in 2005, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. She is a bilingual virtuoso, and has published six other books of poetry, three in each of her two languages. Chaotic Angels brings together the poems from her first three English collections, Parables & Faxes (1995), Zero Gravity (1998) and Keeping Mum (2003). Her modern epic A Hospital Odyssey (Bloodaxe, 2010) and later collection Sparrow Tree (2011) are published separately.

A Hospital Odyssey is an outrageously imaginative voyage through illness and healing. Drawing on the most recent biomedical research into stem cells and cancer, the poem is a journey through the body's inner space and the strange habitats created by disease, including the chimeras people see when they're unwell. Maris, whose husband, Hardy, has been diagnosed with cancer, is separated from him. Her mythical journey leads though a surreal landscape, peopled by true and false physicians, god-celebrities, rabid statues, diseases hunting healthy bodies and a microbes holding their annual ball. The Otherworld is located in the hospital's basement. In her desperate search Maris meets and converses with Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS. Immensely readable, "A Hospital Odyssey" is a modern epic: Dr Who meets Paradise Lost. The poem asks: what is health? And what does it mean to care for someone who's ill?Gwyneth Lewis's dramatisation of A Hospital Odyssey was broadcast as Radio 4's Afternoon Drama on 26 June 2014.

Gwyneth Lewis's highly inventive Sparrow Tree puts nature writing in a spin, presenting a huge variety of birds, both British and American: blue tits, blackbirds, egrets, juncos, starlings, herons and hummingbirds as well as the sparrows of the title. The book explores birds as mouthpieces for inhuman song and the wild inside the mind. Launching flights of avian fancy or fantasy on several levels, Sparrow Tree moves from birdsong as proto-language to birds as decorative beings. The collection includes her already well-known How to Knit a Poem, commissioned by BBC Radio 4, and ends with images of the human word as a form of love. Winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year).

Born in Gwynedd, his father Welsh, his mother from Luxembourg, Rhodri Jones grew up speaking Welsh, English and German. For the past two decades he has travelled widely in Central America, Europe, Africa and the Far East, building up an astounding photographic portfolio with images ranging from the mountains of Albania to the cities and deserts of China. Now based in Italy, he has turned his attention – and his lens – to his country of origin.In a series of arresting images, he captures a society undergoing rapid and massive changes. Both native and outsider, Jones has a unique perspective and a freshness of vision which make his work both compelling and illuminating.Return/Yn Ôl is a bilingual publication, in English and Welsh, with a Foreword by Gwyneth Lewis, National Poet of Wales.

New Stories from the Mabinogion is an exciting series of contemporary novels by leading authors, reworking ancient Celtic myth cycles. The first two stories by Owen Sheers and Russell Celyn Jones were published in October 2009 to great acclaim, with reviews in The Telegraph, The Times, The Financial Times, The Daily Mail, The Independent on Sunday and The Guardian. October 2010 is the turn of Gwyneth Lewis and Niall Griffiths.Blodeuwedd, the fourth branch of the Mabinogion is one of the most famous and rich of the medieval Welsh tales. It has kings who can't walk on the ground, rapists who are condemned to change into the beasts of the forest, a young boy cursed by his mother and a wizard who conjures a wife made of flowers for his nephew. Gwyneth Lewis' retelling is set in the future. The tale is told by the Inspector of Wrecks, who has been tasked to examine a deserted ship, discovered in space. On the verge of retirement he brings all his experience to his last investigation of the physical and virtual reality fields of the ship, as well as the three bodies found floating in the hull. What he discovers shakes him to the core and forces him to question his beliefs about how the imagination creates our lives, and about the disasters that kill us."Seren's series of new stories inspired by the Mabinogion may be the greatest service to the Welsh national epic since Lady Charlotte Guest published her translation of the medieval folk tales in the mid-19th century. Scholars suggest the oldest branches of the saga belong to the 11th century, though Gwyneth Lewis proposes a date several millennia into the future, reconfiguring events into a space quest in which an inspector of lunar wrecks and his young assistant investigate an ancient Earth vessel and find it to contain one of the virtual reality consoles popular 'before you swallowed nano-synaptic dream tablets for recreation and training'. It provides a satisfyingly bizarre context for a narrative about an unfaithful woman made of flowers who turns into an owl, while Lewis's inspector observes events from a hilariously jobs-worth perspective: 'I'm an experienced enough traveller to know that you lose all dignity on a space trip. But that's usually to do with toilet matters, not being banished to a forest with your student, turned into an animal and forced to reproduce.'"Alfred Hickling, The GuardianGwyneth Lewis was appointed Wales' first National Poet in 2005, and composed the six-foot-high words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre. She has published six books of poetry in Welsh and English: her first collection in English, Parables & Faxes (Bloodaxe, 1997), won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, as was her second, Chaotic Angels (Bloodaxe, 2005). Her first non-fiction book, Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression (Harper Perennial, 2002) was shortlisted for the Mind Book of the Year. It has been translated into Dutch, Czech and Spanish, and her Radio 4 adaptation won a Mental Health in the Media award. Her second book of non-fiction, Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate, 2005) was published in both the UK and the US.

In this extraordinary memoir, Gwyneth Lewis, the inaugural National Poet of Wales, recounts her toxic upbringing at the hands of her controlling, coercive mother. It is a book that Gwyneth has been preparing to write all her life, keeping diaries since childhood. In these journals, she interrogates the emotionally abusive relationship she experienced, in great pain but determined to find a way through.Nightshade Mother is a book that Gwyneth co-writes with her younger self, an unexpected and life-saving dialogue through time. Metaphors of haunting intensity help her confront what happened to her; quotations from art and literature guide and steady her. This is a book about the power of art, language and, ultimately, about homecoming over a lifetime of exile from herself. It is a profoundly moving and beautiful work; questing, forgiving and loving in its approach.