Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis on life with emotionally abusive mother

“It’s not easy for a person to reveal such private and personal things,” she said on the Bwrw Golwg programme on BBC Radio Cymru.

“It’s a record of the past but emotional abuse doesn’t go away, someone lives with it constantly.

“When you’re a child you have no protection at all – especially if the abuse takes place in the home.”

Gwyneth Lewis was national poet from 2005-2006, and in 2022 was appointed MBE for services to literature and mental health.

She is also widely known for composing the words on the outside of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff in Welsh and English: Creu gwir fel gwydr o ffwrnais awen, In these stones horizons sing.

Compiled from old diaries, her upcoming memoir Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling recalls how, whilst competing in eisteddfod competitions, her mother Eryl Lewis was given to penning and submitting compositions herself to ensure her daughter won.

This stemmed from wanting her daughter to achieve everything she had not.

But, as a result, Gwyneth Lewis said she was made to feel like a hypocrite and a liar.