James Roose-Evans Memorial Lecture: Gwyneth Lewis - Searching for Roots through Poetry and Language

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Searching for Roots through Poetry and Language

Gwyneth Lewis has been commissioned to edit a new edition of the Penguin Book of Welsh Poetry, which has been out of print since 1967. She asks what is worth highlighting from a tradition? Why do the values in a minority language matter today? If anthologies are a search for roots, how can these best be made available to everybody?

Gwyneth Lewis became the first National Poet of Wales in 2005. She coined the famous phrase that appears in letters six feet tall over the Millennium Centre in Cardiff: ‘In these stones horizons sing.’

Author of ten books of poetry (she writes in both Welsh and English), she won the Bardic Crown at the National Eisteddfod (2012) for a collection of poems entitled Ynys (Island).

She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The Learned Society of Wales. She is also the author of four books of non-fiction, most recently her prize-winning memoir Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling. Her best-selling book is Sunbathing in the Rain: A cheerful book about depression

An alumna of Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Columbia Universities, and the recipient of numerous awards and accolades, Gwyneth says: “I’ve been writing since I was seven or eight years old, and I’ve never lost the childish delight in playing with words. Poetry is the fundamental language underlying all others and, practised with integrity, can produce sociable sanity and hospitality.”