Menna Elfyn

Menna Elfyn is an award winning poet and playwright. She has published fourteen collections of poetry, children’s novels, libretti for UK and US composers as well as plays for television and radio. Merch Perygl (Danger’s Daughter) was published by Gomer Press in 2011, and her bilingual volume Murmur (Bloodaxe Books), in autumn 2012 was selected as Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, the first ever book in Welsh/English to be chosen. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages for which she received an International Foreign Poetry Prize in 2009. In 2016, she published a biography Optimist Absoliwt of the Welsh woman poet Eluned Phillips which was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. The English translation launched in Washington DC in September 2018.

In October 2017, she published a new bilingual collection of poetry Bondo (Bloodaxe Books) which contains a sequence of poems about the Aberfan tragedy. Her literary memoir in Welsh, Cennad, was published by Barddas in March 2018.

She is Professor of Poetry at University of Wales, Trinity Saint David and President of Wales PEN Cymru. She has been a columnist with the national newspaper of Wales since 1994.