Menna Elfyn

Menna Elfyn

 Menna Elfyn

Menna Elfyn (b.1952) is an award-winning poet and playwright who writes with passion of the Welsh language and identity. She is one of Wales's best-known and most translated modern Welsh-language poets. Author of over twenty books of poetry including Aderyn Bach Mewn Llaw (1990), winner of a Welsh Arts Council Prize; the bilingual Eucalyptus: Detholiad o Gerddi / Selected Poems 1978-1994 from Gomer and her previous collection, Cell Angel (1996) from Bloodaxe, children’s novels and educational books, numerous stage, radio and television plays, she has also written libretti for US and UK composers.

In 1999, she co-wrote ‘Garden of Light’, a choral symphony for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra which was performed at the Lincoln Centre in New York. She received a Creative Arts Award in 2008 to write a book on ‘Sleep’. Menna is Director of the Masters Programme in Creative Writing at Trinity University, Carmarthen and is Literary Fellow at Swansea University. In April 2010, Sunflowers in your Eyes, an anthology of four Zimbabwean women poets edited by Elfyn, was published by Cinnamon Press. In 2009, she was awarded the International Anima Istranza Foreign Prize for Poetry in Sardinia.

Perffaith Nam/Perfect Blemish: New and Selected Poems 1995-2007 was published by Bloodaxe in 2007 while Merch Perygl, Cerddi 1976-2011 was published in 2011. When not travelling the world for readings or television work and theatre productions, she lives in Llandysul.

Her biography of Eluned Phillips, Optimist Absoliwt (Gomer, 2016) was shortlisted for the 2017 Welsh Book of the Year Award.