Gwyneth Lewis in conversation with Angela Graham – Cardiff | Kings Road Yard
Arts
Literary Arts
About this event Join Gwyneth Lewis as she discusses her new memoir, Nightshade Mother, with Angela Graham in an event hosted by Caban bookshop. Inaugural National Poet of Wales Gwyneth Lewis 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. Profoundly moving, questing and loving in its approach, Nightshade Mother is a book for anyone who has suffered at the hands of a coercive parent. One of the UK’s most acclaimed writers, Gwyneth Lewis wasbrought 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. Angela Graham is a writer, poet and broadcaster from Northern Ireland who has lived in Wales for many years.
Information Source: Caban bookshop | eventbrite