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An evening with… Gwyneth Lewis
17 October 2024 @ 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
£10.00 – £22.00
Gwyneth Lewis will be in conversation with author Tom Bullough and there will be a signing after the event. All tickets include a glass of wine or a soft drink.
Gwyneth Lewis, the inaugural National Poet of Wales, and one of the UK’s leading poets, kept the story of her painful upbringing to herself – until now. Finally, in her memoir Nightshade Mother, she writes of the pain she suffered at the hands of her controlling, coercive mother. It is a book that Gwyneth has been preparing to write all her life, in diaries which she’s kept since childhood. In these journals, she interrogates the mother/daughter relationship, in great pain but determined to find a way through.
The result is a memoir which Gwyneth co-writes with her younger self, an unexpected and life-saving dialogue through time. Metaphors of haunting intensity help her confront what happened to her; quotations from art and literature guide and steady her. Nightshade Mother is a book about the power of art, about language, and about homecoming, after a lifetime of exile from herself. It is profoundly moving, questing and loving in its approach.
‘This is an extraordinary book: an anatomy of an abusive relationship, harrowing but leavened by love, a deep belief in the power of words and the wisdom earned through decades of reflection. It is, in the end, a story of healing. Inspirational.’ Tom Bullough
About Gwyneth Lewis
One of the UK’s most acclaimed writers, Lewis was brought up Welsh-speaking in Cardiff. She studied English and spent time in America. She was Wales’s first National Poet and composed the six-foot-high words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre. Her other non-fiction books are Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage. Her tenth book of poetry, First Rain in Paradise, is forthcoming in March 2025. Gwyneth was awarded an MBE in 2023 for services to literature and mental health.
About Tom Bullough
Tom Bullough is the author of four novels, including Addlands, a story of seventy years on a Radnorshire hill farm, which, among other plaudits, was the subject of a sermon in Westminster Abbey. His fifth book, Sarn Helen – a study of Welsh history and the climate crisis, illustrated by Jackie Morris – was named the Wales Book of the Year 2024.