I’ve been writing since I was seven or eight years old and have 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.
I was Wales’s first National Poet in 2005 and wrote the bilingual six-foot-high words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre, which has become an icon for Wales. In 2022 I was awarded an MBE for services to literature and mental health, but managed to leave the ceremony in Cardiff without my medal.
Brought up Welsh-speaking in Cardiff, I studied English and then went to America as a Harkness Fellow, studying writing at Harvard and Columbia Universities. After completing a doctorate at Oxford, I worked as a television producer at the BBC before going freelance.
My tenth book of poems, First Rain in Paradise, is published in 2025. My work has been awarded Wales Book of the Year in both Welsh and English and I received the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize. The Society of Authors gave me a Cholmondeley Award for a distinguished body of writing.
Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (2002) was my first non-fiction book. Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (2005) is the account of a long voyage in a small vessel. Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (2024) describes the effects of being emotionally abused by my controlling mother. With Rowan Williams I translated The Book of Taliesin (2019) for Penguin Classics.
In recent years, I’ve been teaching regularly at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, was a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton in 2014 and, in the last few years, have been Artist in Residence at Balliol College, Oxford. I teach online for The Writing School and the WISE programme of NHS Wales and am available for private mentoring.
Nightshade Mother won the 2025 Wales Book of the Year Non-fiction.