Gwyneth Lewis NIGHTSHADE MOTHER with Kate Kennedy

Nightshade Mother

In this extraordinary memoir, Gwyneth Lewis, the inaugural National Poet of Wales, recounts her toxic upbringing at the hands of her controlling, coercive mother. It is a book that Gwyneth has been preparing to write all her life, keeping diaries since childhood. In these journals, she interrogates the emotionally abusive relationship she experienced, in great pain but determined to find a way through.

Nightshade Mother is a book that 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. This is a book about the power of art, language and, ultimately, about homecoming over a lifetime of exile from herself. It is a profoundly moving and beautiful work; questing, forgiving and loving in its approach.

Gwyneth Lewis

Gwyneth Lewis was the first National Poet of Wales and wrote the six-foot-high words on the front of the iconic Wales Millennium Centre. She’s an award-winning poet in both Welsh and English and has published ten collections. Her third memoir, Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling gives an account of the emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. It won then Wales Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for a Sky Arts Award. Gwyneth was Artist in Residence at Balliol for the last four years.

Kate Kennedy

Kate Kennedy is a biographer and BBC broadcaster, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing, and a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. She is the author of numerous books on twentieth century literature and music, and most recently co-editor with Dame Hermione Lee of Lives of Houses, and author of Dweller in Shadows – A Life of Ivor Gurney. Her most recent book Cello – A Journey From Silence to Sound met with international acclaim and was shortlisted for multiple awards in the UK and US. Kate is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and recipient of Oxford University’s Chancellor’s Prize for Public Engagement with Research.

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