Born in Guyana, Grace Nichols has lived in Britain since 1977. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Most of that book is included in her later retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems (2010). Four subsequent poetry collections were published by Virago: The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), Sunris (1996), winner of the Guyana Prize, and Startling the Flying Fish (2006), poems which tell the story of the Caribbean. She has published four books with Bloodaxe, Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009), I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems (2010), The Insomnia Poems (2017), and Passport to Here and There (2020), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She has also published several poetry books for younger readers, including Come on into My Tropical Garden (1988), Give Yourself a Hug (1994), Everybody Got a Gift (2005) and Cosmic Disco (2013). She lives in Sussex with the poet John Agard and their family. She was made a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020. In December 2021 it was announced that Grace Nichols had been named winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2021. She was presented with the award by Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle in March 2022.
