Donna Ashworth: ‘I write for the masses – you can’t criticise me for that’

On May 14 2020, several celebrities including Michael Sheen and Vicky McClure read a line each from the poem “History Will Remember When The World Stopped” over Zoom from their front rooms in aid of NHS Wales. It was two months into the first lockdown, and the poem, which spoke with incantatory simplicity of when “the children stayed at home”, and of when “people sang on their balconies... so very much together in courage and in song” had become a viral sensation: Amnesty International also reproduced it on a promotional leaflet. 

Few people, though, had heard of the author, Donna Ashworth, a 48-year-old mother of two from a small village outside Stirling in Scotland. “I wasn’t aware anything was happening,” says Ashworth who at that point hadn’t published anything beyond the verse she posted on her blog. “I only knew celebrities were performing my work when it popped up on my phone.”

Ashworth has now written eight books of poetry, which have earned more than a million pounds’ worth of sales. She is also adept at monetising her product: with her website offering tote bags, candles and mugs emblazoned with her verse. Her latest collection, Wild Hope, has spent 11 weeks in the Sunday Times best-seller charts and her work is read out loud at funerals, at weddings and on TikTok. Ashworth’s secret? Her poetry deals in uplifting messages that work like motivational Post-It notes, reminding you to “let the wind blow you wherever you need to go” and to “stop trying to be something you are not”. 

And, speaking to a nation traumatised by lockdown, they have turned her into a publishing sensation: last year she was the UK’s best-selling poet. “I had anorexia in my teens and I’ve also struggled with my mental health so that’s where a lot of my poetry comes from,” she says. “The intention is always to share a healing message.” She laughs. “It sounds cheesy but a lot of what I say is cheesy.”

Ashworth is far from the only poet to combine self-help slogans in verse form with a voracious social media following to send poetry sales rocketing (there were more than £11 million worth of poetry books sold in the UK last year, the highest since records began), and in doing so, changing the image of poetry as a heroic but lonely, largely thankless struggle. The average poet in the UK is likely to sell 500 copies within a year of publication, while even the Poet Laureate only receives a token salary of £6,000 per annum. There are, of course, exceptions. The Canadian poet Rupi Kaur has made more than £5 million from her work; in the UK, only Ted Hughes, Pam Ayres and Seamus Heaney have sold more copies.

Yet while Ashworth is older than most of her Gen Z peers, she has the same sure sense of her market. She also knows she fits into the trend for poetry – or any culture at all, for that matter – that bucks the dead white male establishment image.  “I’m not someone who has come up through the ranks. I’m not the sort of person to whom anyone is going to say, ‘in you come, we’ll make you the next Poet Laureate’. And that’s fine because today we read, think and write differently. The poetry world had become stagnant, people were reading the same poems at funerals that they had 100 years ago.”

We meet in the house, close to where she grew up, she shares with her two sons and her husband, the former TV producer Robert Ashworth, who was formerly married to the actress Tracy Shaw and who was a victim of the Daily Mirror phone hacking scandal: he was awarded substantial damages in 2015.  He now works in property development with his mother-in-law, close to where Donna grew up (her dad works in the oil industry). 

By chance, the road on which she lives is named after Robert Burns, who had once spent time in the area. Is she a fan of Burns, whose poems are wild romantic celebrations of traditional Scottish life? “I have to be because I’m Scottish. I like him in a ‘what’s not to like way? It’s Rabbie Burns!’ But I don’t particularly relate to the subject matter.” Her house is large, airy, modestly plush and bought before her career took off – and she has no plans to move. “I’m making money, yes, and I enjoy it,” she says. “But I’m not loaded. It’s a lovely way to make a very nice living, which is all I’ve ever wanted.”

Ashworth never harboured dreams of becoming a writer. She studied film, theatre studies and Italian at Glasgow University, but within the first few months had the first of several breakdowns. A fellow student had died by suicide, and the murder of two-year-old James Bulger (by two 10-year-old boys) had also recently occurred, which deeply affected her. “I have high anxiety and I often respond to [other people’s tragedies] by catastrophising them. So I left all my stuff in the middle of the night and went back home to my mum.”

She was determined to break into the music industry and, after a stint singing cabaret on cruise ships, she got a management contract and moved to Manchester. Yet the record contract never materialised, so she moved into magazine journalism. She also began writing a feminist blog in 2017, mainly featuring inspirational quotes from other people. Yet during lockdown, during which she and her family moved back to Scotland, she started posting her own thoughts and the odd poem.

When “History Will Remember When The World Stopped” went viral, she decided to do it properly. “It gave me the courage to produce a little pamphlet featuring poems about lockdown on Amazon.” When that sold well, she published another one three months later, To The Women, which has sold 100,000 copies. In 2021 she signed with Bonnier. Her ninth collection, Growing Brave, is out in September.

She knows all the criticisms that tend to be levied against her sort of poetry – that it’s reductive and revels in generic therapeutic slogans. “You can never criticise me by saying that I write simply, or that I write for the masses – because I’m absolutely delighted by these things,” she says. Her poetry certainly appears to offer solace – “You’re The Ghost”, which begins “There’s a part of the grieving process / where your soul kind of leaves your body too”, and which neatly suggests the experience of bereavement itself is like a form of death, has garnered tens of thousands of grateful comments on Facebook.

Did she read a lot of poetry as a child? “We did Sylvia Plath at school but I didn’t like it – it was too depressing. I’ve struggled too with thoughts of suicide so I found it hard to read. But I can remember feeling deeply moved, less alone and inspired to be braver with my feelings because of poetry.” All the same, she thinks people “apart from a 0.2 per cent elite” are turned off poetry at school because of the way it is taught. “It’s often just too complicated. We’ve become ashamed of simplicity.”

She doesn’t edit her work. “I made a pact with myself – once I’d written it, it was out. There was no editing, no redrafting, no worry over whether it was good. I’ll share it and if it connects with people, I’ll put it in the next book.” She no longer reads traditional poetry but does read a lot of the younger poets – the Scots poet Len Pennie, the Instagram star Brianna Wiest, and also the late American poet Mary Oliver. She comes across as sincere, and a lot of her work is seductively readable, even if the positive messaging is relentless: “Each of us is born with something special” begins the poem “Your Gift”.

Still, does she ever read a poem by someone else and think, gosh, that’s bad? “It’s in the eye of the beholder. All that matters is – did you like it? Did it bring out something in you? If so, well, that’s good poetry. Can it be judged [critically] as good poetry? Well, who’s in charge?”

I Wish I Knew by Donna Ashworth is out in paperback now (RRP £8.99).