Guyanese-born poet Grace Nichols has won the 2026 Royal Society of Literature Pioneer prize, a £10,000 award recognising women writers over 60 who overcame barriers in the literary world, according to The Guardian.
Nichols, 76, moved to Britain in 1977 and gained recognition with I Is a Long-Memoried Woman, which won the Commonwealth poetry prize in 1983. *The Fat Black Woman’s Poems* followed in 1984.
Her poetry draws on Guyanese oral traditions, landscapes and the history of slavery, while exploring migration, identity and life in Britain. She has written for adults and children, and her poems have featured on British school syllabuses for decades.
According to The Guardian’s November 3 report, judging panel chair Ruth Borthwick praised Nichols’s distinctive combination of Creole and standard English and her influence on generations of diaspora poets.
Fellow judge Sarah Howe described Nichols as “a trailblazer in the truest sense”.
Nichols said she was surprised to receive news of the award and expressed gratitude to the judges and her parents, who had made books part of family life.
The Pioneer prize was established last year by writer Bernardine Evaristo, who donated the £100,000 she received from the Women’s prize outstanding contribution award to fund it for ten years.
The award recognises a different literary form each year, with poetry selected for 2026. Novelist, playwright and activist Maureen Duffy was its inaugural recipient.
Nichols’s other collections include Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman, Sunris and Startling the Flying Fish. She also published the novel Whole of a Morning Sky and has collaborated on children’s anthologies with her partner, fellow Guyanese poet John Agard.
A vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, Nichols received the Queen’s gold medal for poetry in 2021.
The Guardian reported that her next adult collection, The Tracks of My Name, will be published on November 19. She will also be celebrated at a British Library event on March 1, 2027.
Stabroek News reported in December 2021 that Nichols was unanimously recommended for the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry by the medal committee chaired by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Her collection Sunris also won the Guyana Prize for Poetry, while her novel Whole of a Morning Sky was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize.
In a January 2022 Arts on Sunday feature, Stabroek News examined how Nichols celebrates her Guyanese and Caribbean heritage through poems addressing indentureship, migration and women’s experiences.
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