Gwyneth Lewis talks to Kate Kennedy

Wales’s first national poet Gwyneth Lewis talks about her memoir of growing up at the hands of a coercive and controlling mother.

Lewis says she has been preparing all her life to write the book about the emotionally abusive daughter-mother relationship. The memoir is co-written with her younger self and is about the power of art and language and about coming home after a lifetime of exile from oneself.

‘This book was dangerous to write and is troubling to read. …. She succeeds in negotiating a liberating truce with her deeply troubled past. And so this remarkable volume ends in cautious optimism with the rebirth of a person and of a writer.’ M Wynn Thomas

Lewis became the first national poet of Wales in 2005 and her six-foot-high words are on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre. Her tenth book of poetry, First Rain, is published in 2025. Lewis won the Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award for a distinguished body of writing and is artist in residence at Balliol College, Oxford. Here she talks to writer, cellist, broadcaster and director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing Dr Kate Kennedy.