Gillian Clarke

One of Elif Shafak’s selected writers for the International Literature Showcase

“A towering figure in Welsh literature, Gillian Clarke’s poetry is simultaneously haunting and immediate, shifting between languages in its exploration of the local and the global, doing so with a fierce music.” – Elif Shafak

<< Explore Elif’s list of great UK women writers

Welsh poet, broadcaster, playwright, conserver of eighteen beautiful Ceredigion acres

Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales 2008-2016, President of Tŷ Newydd, the Welsh Writers Centre. Awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010. Her Selected Poems was published by Picador in 2016, Zoology, her ninth collection from Carcanet, in 2017; Roots Home, essays and a journal, Carcanet, February 2021. Her version of Aneirin’s 7th century Welsh poem, Y Gododdin, is published as a bilingual text by Faber in May 2021. Work in progress: The Silence, a collection of poems. She lives on a smallholding in Ceredigion where, in 2019, six acres were planted with native woodland.

‘Gillian Clarke is one of the most widely respected and deeply loved poets in the world.’ – Carol Ann Duffy

‘Gillian Clarke’s [poems] ring with lucidity and power… Clarke’s work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical.’ –Times Literary Supplement

‘How hard it is to write such poems, how easy to enjoy them.’ – Poetry Review

“Proud to put Wales – national art, poetry – on the international stage” – Gillian