Wales Literature Exchange interviewed our Bookshelf author Gillian Clarke about her writing and influences.

1. What first inspired you to be an author and where do your ideas comfrom?

Being read to by my mother, thus learning to read by the time I was four. Nursery rhymes, songs, playground games. Ideas comes from being alive, alert, observant, thinking and listening.

2. How would you describe your writing?

Truth in word-music, I hope.

3. Which authors have influenced you the most?

Yeats. Dylan Thomas. RS Thomas. Keats. Shakespeare. Jane Austen, and many others

4. In your opinion what are the biggest challenges that writers face today – and do you think these challenges have changed since you started writing?

Writers just use the world they live in, as they know it. But poets should beware of trends like making blocks of words, brick walls with no lyric sound. They won’t sing in the mind, as poetry does.

5. What are the hardest and easiest parts of being a writer?

Writing is neither hard nor easy, but natural. I have kept a hand-written journal since childhood. I write every day. It’s like thinking. It is pleasing if a publisher wants my work, but I would write anyway.

6. Which writer from Wales would you recommend to readers and why?

Dylan Thomas, the absolutely best example of my belief that poetry, the best prose and dramatic speech are the truth made with word-music

The Gododdin : Lament for the Fallen is selected to our 2021–22 Bookshelf, our annual selection of recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation.