About Grace Nichols
Grace Nichols was born in 1950 in Georgetown, Guyana. She has written many poetry books, some of which were inspired by her homeland and her experiences of England. She writes for adults and children.Her first collection, “I is a Long-Memoried Woman” (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize: a book where a black woman evokes in the first person the pains and the condition of black slaves, forced labor, and the vicissitudes of their existence. At the same time, she compares the ancestral African world to fertility goddesses and describes traditional women adorned with the power of their daily lives: cooking, farming, and raising children. During the 80s, she published two more important books: “The Fat Black Woman's Poems” (1984) and the novel for adults, “Whole of a Morning Sky”, edited in London by Virago Press in 1986. Her children's books include collections of short stories and poetry anthologies like “Give Yourself a Hug” (1994), “No, Baby, No!” (2011) and “Cosmic Disco”, published in 2013. Some of her best-known poems include “Hurricane Hits England” and “Praise Song For My Mother”.
She graduated with a degree in communications from the University of Guyana and worked as a teacher from 1967 to 1970, then as a freelance journalist until 1977 and in government information services from 1973 to 1976. She immigrated with her first daughter Lesley and her partner, the Guyanese poet John Agard, to the United Kingdom in 1977. They have one daughter together, Kalera.
In 1992, her work was featured in the anthology “Daughters of Africa” (edited by Margaret Busby). Nichols has published many other volumes of poetry, including “Sunris” (1996), “Picasso, I Want My Face Back” (2009), “The Insomnia Poems” (2017) and “Passport to Here and There”, published by Bloodaxe in 2020.
In December 2021, Nichols was the recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry on the basis of her body of work, chosen by a committee chaired by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage.
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