Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Poet
About
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch is a poet who has published two collections with Picador, both of which were shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. Her third collection Banjo looks at the way music and the theatre played an important role in the mental health of the crews of Antarctic expeditions during the early twentieth century. One of these poems won second prize in the 2011 National Poetry Competition.
Collaborating across genres has long fascinated Samantha, including drawing her poems, dancing them and turning them into collages: in 2012 Samantha won a Leverhulme Writer in Residence award to explore the textiles and traditions of the wool industry in Wales. The resulting pamphlet, Lime & Winter was published by Rack Press in 2014 and went on to be shortlisted for the Michael Marks award. In 2015 she won an Arts Council Creative Wales award to write and perform in Tango in Stanzas, and her asemic writing has been exhibited at Aberystwyth School of Art. Samantha’s radiophonic poem The Milk Way was broadcast on Radio 3 in 2018. Her work has been anthologised almost every year since the millennium.
As a volunteer with the National Garden Scheme and the Laudato Si Garden project in Aberystwyth, Samantha spends a lot of time in gardens and woods. Her fourth collection Milk Wood Memoir (Picador, 2026) looks at the slowly disappearing wood of Dylan Thomas’s play for voices.