Gwyneth Lewis was appointed Wales's first National Poet in April 2005. She has published six books of poetry in Welsh and English. Her first collection in English, Parables & Faxes (Bloodaxe, 1995) won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and was short listed for the Forward, as was her second, Zero Gravity (Bloodaxe, 1998). The BBC made a documentary of Zero Gravity, inspired by her astronaut cousin's voyage to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Y Llofrudd Iaith ('The Language Murderer', Barddas, 2000), won the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year Prize and Keeping Mum was short listed for the same prize in 2004.

Gwyneth's first non-fiction book Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression (Flamingo 2002), was shortlisted for the Mind Book of the Year. Her second, Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage, was published by Fourth Estate in May 2005 (April 2006 in the US) and recounts a voyage which she made with her husband on a small boat from Cardiff to North Africa. She has written an oratorio based on a short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Most Beautiful Man from the Sea, performed in the Wales Millennium Centre in August 2005 by the Chorus of Welsh National Opera and five hundred amateur singers. Gwyneth was responsible for composing the words on the front of Cardiff's new Wales Millennium Centre, each letter of which is a six-foot high glass window (probably the biggest poem in the world). She is one of the poets in the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation promotion.

Gwyneth was a scholar at Girton College, Cambridge and was awarded a double first in English literature and the Laurie Hart Prize for outstanding intellectual work. She received a D.Phil in English from Oxford, having written a thesis on eighteenth-century literary forgery. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the Welsh Academi and a NESTA Fellow. In 2005 she was elected Honorary Fellow of Cardiff University. In the past she spent three years in the US as a Harkness Fellow and was a documentary producer and director at BBC Wales. She left the BBC to become a freelance writer. She is currently Writer in Residence at the Department of Astrophysics of Cardiff University.