Donna Ashworth
The Mid•Point with Gabby Logan
The Midpoint
4.3 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest this week is someone whose words have stopped people in their tracks all over the world. Donna Ashworth is a poet whose work has taken social media by storm — honest, warm and deeply human poems that somehow manage to say exactly what so many of us are feeling but can't quite find the words for ourselves.
What I love about Donna's story is that it didn't happen overnight — she came to poetry later in life, through her own personal journey, and that experience is at the heart of everything she writes. She is a perfect Midpoint guest because she understands better than most what it means to find your true purpose when you least expect it. This is a really beautiful and uplifting conversation about creativity, self discovery and the extraordinary power of the right words at the right time.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Midpoint. My guest today was one of the best things to come out of the global pandemic. Her online feminist poetry certainly had a following, but it was her 2020 poem of gratitude which was used as a poem to thank the NHS, which sent her career into orbit. She's since become a Sunday Times bestseller. |
| 0:23.6 | She's the UK's number one selling living poet, and her daily social media offerings to her |
| 0:28.2 | two million followers often feel like a morning hug. I am delighted to welcome Donna Ashworth to the |
| 0:33.7 | midpoint. Donna, it is an absolute joy to have you on the midpoint. I say in your |
| 0:39.1 | introduction that you, I guess, are one of the great positives of lockdown. Does it feel like |
| 0:46.0 | that's where things changed for you? Yeah. Yeah, I was just saying earlier today, I am a lockdown |
| 0:50.9 | baby. You know, I'm a pivot person who just started something completely different in lockdown |
| 0:56.7 | and changed my whole life. |
| 0:59.1 | I moved as well from England back home to Scotland in lockdown. |
| 1:04.4 | Well, in between the two lockdown. |
| 1:06.3 | When you were allowed to. |
| 1:09.0 | Changed career. |
| 1:10.3 | My husband changed career because we were out of jobs because of the lockdown. |
| 1:15.4 | So completely, this is a lockdown pivot moment that I'm still very much in choice. |
| 1:21.6 | As somebody who is the best-selling living poet, it seems remarkable that you had another life, you know. |
| 1:30.4 | So tell us a bit about pre-lockdown. |
| 1:33.7 | So my husband and I owned a children's play centre, a very large, you know, with all the ballpills and the noise and chaos constantly, |
| 1:46.6 | which, you know, we thought we'd be a lovely family business to run. But what we didn't realise is seven days a week and you only close |
| 1:52.5 | on new year and, you know, Christmas Day, it's very, very full on. So we were doing that and we |
| 1:59.1 | were ready to move on from it after 10 years. I was ready to move on from it after 10 years. |
| 2:01.4 | I was ready to move on from it after a year. |
| 2:04.9 | But we loved the staff as well and we loved to, you know, the cusset. |
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