Gwyneth Lewis, the first poet laureate of Wales, has published seven books of poetry, including Parables & Faxes (1995), Zero Gravity (1998), Y Llofrudd Iaith ('The Language Murderer,' 1999), and Chaotic Angels (2005) . Her poetry collections have won prestigious awards, such as the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year Prize. She has published two non-fiction books, Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression (2002) and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (2005), which recounts a voyage which she made with her husband on a small boat from Cardiff to North Africa. Gwyneth was a scholar at Girton College, Cambridge and was awarded a double first in English literature and the Laurie Hart Prize for outstanding intellectual work. She received a D.Phil in English from Oxford, having written a thesis on eighteenth-century literary forgery. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the Welsh Academi and a NESTA Fellow. NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, the organisation that invests in UK creativity and innovation. In 2005 she was elected Honorary Fellow of Cardiff University. In the past she spent three years in the US as a Harkness Fellow and was a documentary producer and director at BBC Wales, where she won a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts award). She left the BBC to become a freelance writer. She is currently a Writer Fellow at Stanford University (2009-2010). Her most recent poetry book A Hospital Odyssey (2010) recounts the experiences of a woman whose husband has been diagnosed with cancer.

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