Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet who writes in English. She was born in 1937 and was brought up in Cardiff and Penarth, though for part of the Second World War she was in Pembrokeshire.
Although both of her parents were native Welsh speakers, she was brought up speaking only English, and she learnt to speak Welsh as an adult. After graduating in English from University of Wales, Cardiff, she spent a year working for the BBC in London. She then returned to Cardiff where she married and had a daughter, Catrin, and two sons.
She worked as an English teacher, first in the Reardon-Smith Nautical College, and later in Newport College of Art. In the mid 1980s she moved to rural Ceredigion, west Wales with her second husband, after which time she spent some years as a creative writing tutor at the University of Glamorgan.
