Welsh poetry in translation

Menna Elfyn is an award winning Welsh poet and playwright. She has published over fourteen collections of poetry, as well as numerous non-fiction books, libretti for UK and US composers, plays for television and radio, children’s novels, and collaborative art projects.

Her work has been translated into over twenty languages for which she has received in recent years an International Foreign Poetry Prize. Asserting herself as an international poet with a Welsh tongue, she encourages the translation of her Welsh language poetry be that through collaborative projects or through travelling extensively across the globe, from international poetry festivals through to organised events and residencies.

When Menna published her first selected poems Eucalyptus in 1995, eminent poet and translator Tony Conran called her ‘the first Welsh poet in fifteen hundred years to make a serious attempt to have her work known outside of Wales’ with The British Council also noting since this time that Menna is ‘perhaps the best-known Welsh language poet internationally, and certainly the most-travelled worldwide’.

She is Professor Emeritus of Poetry at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and also a Fellow of two other Welsh universities. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is currently President of Wales PEN Cymru which campaigns for the freedom of expression of writers worldwide.