Gilgamesh Retold

About Jenny Lewis

Jenny Lewis is an Anglo-Welsh poet playwright songwriter childrens author and translator who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She trained as a painter at the Ruskin School of Art before reading English at St Edmund Hall Oxford. She has worked as an advertising copywriter and a government press officer for among others the Equality and Human Rights Commission. She has also written childrens books and plays and co-written with its creator Kate Canning a twenty-six-part childrens TV animation series James the Cat. Her first poetry sequence When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press 1996) was broadcast on BBC Womans Hour translated into Russian (Bilingua 2002) and made into an opera with music by Gennadyi Shizoglazov which had its world premiere with the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company in Perm Russia November 2017. Since 2012 Jenny has been working with the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh on an award-winning Arts Council-funded project `Writing Mesopotamia which aims to build bridges and foster friendships between English and Arabic-speaking communities. Her work for the theatre includes Map of Stars (2002) Garden of the Senses (2005) After Gilgamesh (2011) and with Yasmin Sidhwa and Adnan al-Sayegh Stories for Survival: a Re-telling of the 1001 Arabian Nights (2015). She has published two collections with Oxford Poets/Carcanet Fathom (2007) and Taking Mesopotamia (2014). Jenny is currently completing a PhD on Gilgamesh at Goldsmiths.