Grace Nichols is a Guyanese poet and novelist, and a writer and editor of children’s books, based in England. She is the most recent recipient of the prestigious Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2021. Her first poetry collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and was adapted for radio and film. Nichols was one of six leading Black British poets interviewed for the Observer in 2020 and her poems are studied as part of the English GCSE curriculum.
She has authored many poetry collections including The Fat Black Woman's Poems, Sunris, and Picasso, I Want My Face Back, and has received multiple presitigious awards during her long career, including the Cholmondeley Award, the CLPE Poetry Award, and the Guyana Poetry Award in 2008. In 2020, Grace Nichols was made a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature.
Her ninth and most recent publication, Passport To Here and There, was published in 2021. In this collection, Grace Nichols traces a journey that moves from the coastal memories of a Guyana childhood to life in Britain and her adoptive Sussex landscape. Embracing connections and reconnections, she turns the ordinary into something sensuous and memorable, whether personal or public, contemporary or historical.
