THE FACE OF MODERN POETRY

Best-selling poet Donna Ashworth invites HELLO! into her new home to talk celebrations, success and her Second Act

- MELANIE MACLEOD

Best-selling poet Donna Ashworth has always had a way with words - even if there was a time when she had I forgotten all about it.

The Sunday Times best-selling author, whose most recent book To the Women has just spent another week at the top of the book charts, has more than 430,000 followers on Instagram and has won celebrity fans such as Davina McCall and Fearne Cotton.

But she never set out to make poetry her career. Before 2020, she worked as a journalist and ran a children's play centre with her husband Robert, a former producer on Coronation Street, as well as singing on cruise ships. Poetry, however, had been in the background since she was a teenager.

"I wasn't aware of it until I found my own diaries and they're full of poems," the 49-yearold exclusively tells HELLO! from her new home just outside Stirling in Scotland.

"They're not that different from what I'm doing now, except they're very much teenage heartache and angst.

"I can't bear to read them, to be honest with you," she says. "It's like when you read your Facebook posts from five years ago - it's hideous.

"Looking back, writing has always been there, but it didn't come out again, or with any intent, until my mid-40s," she says.

"The imposter syndrome was high, but I had a feeling that it would be worth it and that something might be on the other side."

GIVING POETRY NEW LIFE

Having sold more than 300,000 copies of her seven books, Donna has become the face of modern poetry. Her works - which touch on the joy of ageing, the pain of loss and the euphoria of falling in love - are said to be responsible for the huge rise in sales of poetry volumes in the UK.