Ruth Bidgood (July 1922-March 2022)

Biography, as originally provided by Ruth and updated with her approval in 2019:
 
Ruth Bidgood lives in mid-Wales. Her 2016 collection is double-ended – Land-Music is the new poems end, the other end, Black Mountains, collects her scattered poems about that area, and includes a foreword by the author, and afterword by the critic Matthew Jarvis, author of Ruth Bidgood in the Writers of Wales series (Univ. of Wales Press 2012). Ruth Bidgood also writes local history – she has articles in county journals and a prose book, Parishes of the Buzzard (Goldleaf, 2000).
 
After grammar school in Port Talbot, South Wales, and taking her degree in English from St Hugh’s College, Oxford, Ruth served in the WRNS as a coder, mainly in Alexandria. In post-war London she worked for a time on a new edition of Chambers’ Encyclopaedia, then moved with her husband to Coulsdon, Surrey. They had two sons and a daughter. During this time, they bought a bungalow in Abergwesyn, Powys, which eventually became Ruth’s home, and where she started to write poems and undertook research on local history.
 
Of her poetry collections (listed below), the second received a Welsh Arts Council award in 1976, two were short-listed for Welsh Book of the Year (1993 and 1997), and one for the Roland Mathias Prize in 2005. Her collection Time Being was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the Roland Mathias Prize, 2011. Above the Forests was published by Cinnamon Press in 2012, the publishers of her 2016 ‘double-ended’ collection Land-music / Black Mountains. Land-music is a collection of new poems; Black Mountains, collects her scattered poems about that area. A prose book, Parishes of the Buzzard’ (a history of the Abergwesyn area) was published by Goldleaf, Port Talbot in 2000. Historical articles have appeared in county journals.
 
Publications:
 
Land Music / Black Mountains, Cinnamon Press, 2016
Above the Forests, Cinnamon Press, 2012
Time Being, Seren, 2009 – a PBS Recommendation
Hearing Voices (found poems), Cinnamon Press, 2008
Symbols of Plenty (a selection of longer poems), Canterbury Press, 2006
New and Selected Poems, Seren, 2004
Singing to Wolves, Seren, 2000
Parishes of the Buzzard (prose), Goldleaf, 2000
The Fluent Moment, Seren, 1996
Selected Poems, Seren, 1992
Kindred, Poetry Wales Press (now Seren), 1986
Lighting Candles, Poetry Wales Press (now Seren), 1982
The Print of Miracle, Gomer, 1978
Not Without Homage, Christopher Davies, 1975
The Given Time, Christopher Davies, 1972