Biography
Lewis was born into a Welsh speaking family in Cardiff; her father started teaching her English when her mother went into hospital to give birth to her sister.
Lewis attended Ysgol Gyfun Rhydfelen, a bilingual school near Pontypridd, and then studied at Girton College, Cambridge, University of Cambridge, where she was a member of Cymdeithas Y Mabinogi and was awarded a double first in English literature and the Laurie Hart Prize for outstanding intellectual work. Lewis then studied creative writing at Columbia and Harvard, before receiving a D.Phil in English from Balliol College, Oxford University, having written a thesis on eighteenth-century literary forgery on the work of Iolo Morganwg.
Lewis was made a Harkness Fellow and worked as a freelance journalist in New York for three years. Lewis returned to Cardiff and worked as a documentary producer and director at BBC Wales.
Lewis left the BBC in 2001 after she was awarded a £75,000 grant by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts to carry out research and to sail to ports that are linked historically with the inhabitants of her native city, Cardiff.
She later wrote the words which appear over the Wales Millennium Centre which opened in November 2004. The same words form the title of Karl Jenkins' cantata In These Stones Horizons Sing, which is partly set to lyrics by Gwyneth Lewis. In 2005 she was elected Honorary Fellow of Cardiff University. The same year she was made the first National Poet of Wales.
She was a judge for the 2011 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.
On 6 August 2012 she won Y Goron (the Crown) at the National Eisteddfod at Llandow for a collection of poems on the set title of 'Ynys' ('Island').
Read more about this topic: Gwyneth Lewis
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