Grace Nichols is a Guyanese poet, novelist, and a writer and editor of children’s books. Born in Guyana in 1950, Nichols worked as a teacher and journalist before moving to Britain in 1977. Nichols quickly became one of a number of Caribbean writers whose work spoke to Britain’s racial tensions and also resonantly explored plurality, womanhood and family. Her writing is characterised by its linguistic hybridity and performability - its fusion of Guyanese Creole and Standard English creating new possibilities for rhyme and rhythm - and as such her poems are studied widely on the UK’s GCSE curriculum and have served as an introduction to poetry for several generations of schoolchildren. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and among her many works, notable poetry collections include The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Sunris (1996), Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009) and Passport To Here and There (2020). In 2021, Nichols was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
