Bridport Prize 2012 Judge

Gwyneth Lewis was the National Poet of Wales 2005-06. She's an award-winning author of eight books of poetry, her latest is Sparrow Tree (Bloodaxe 2011). She's written two memoirs - Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression and Two in a Boat. Words she composed are on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in six-foot high letters, rumoured to be the largest poem in the world.

Gwyneth has a doctorate from Oxford University. In the 1980s she was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard and then Columbia University, New York. She has been a NESTA Awardee and has received Wellcome Trust and Creative Wales Awards. Gwyneth is an Honorary Fellow of Cardiff and Liverpool Universities and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Recently she has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the Stanford Humanities Center and Girton College, Cambridge. Gwyneth worked as a television documentary producer at the BBC and has written plays, libretti and a novella.

I will be looking for that electricity which plays along the surface of language under unusual pressure - whether that be exerted by originality, intelligence, awareness or all the above.

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