Grace Nichols was born and brought up in Guyana. After working there as a teacher and journalist, she came to Britain in 1977. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has published many books of poetry for both adults and children, including the bestselling, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984). Her latest collection, Passport to Here and There was published by Bloodaxe in April 2020. In 2020, she was elected Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2022 she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.