Grace Nichols Books
January 18, 1950
Grace Nichols is an author with a unique voice, drawing inspiration from Guyana's rich cultural heritage. Her works explore themes of identity, memory, and cultural hybridity, often weaving in the region's vibrant oral traditions and mythology. Nichols masterfully blends personal and collective narratives, crafting poetry and prose that are both intimate and epic. Her writing offers a valuable contribution to literature, revealing the beauty and complexity of the Caribbean experience.
An award-winning collection of poetry vividly evoking the experience of living in the Caribbean - and of leaving for other lands.This prestigious anthology, which won the 2003 CLPE Poetry Award, conjures up the sights and sounds, tastes and tales of the Caribbean; the experience of living there - and of leaving for other lands. A companion to the acclaimed A Caribbean Dozen, this book contains more than fifty poems by over thirty poets, including John Agard, Grace Nichols, James Berry, Valerie Bloom and Benjamin Zephaniah.
I Is A Long Memoried Woman, a collection by Guyanese poetess Grace Nichols, was first published in 1983 and a winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Nichols’ work develops the story of an anonymous African-Caribbean woman as she recounts the cruelty of slavery and its crippling effects on body, mind, and spirit. The narrator’s story is told in a rich language, which compliments the form to result in a rhythmic musicality reminiscent of spiritual slave songs.The collection of poems is divided into five sections, each an extended snapshot of the narrator’s life, and provides a view on slavery that cannot be delivered through a textbook, such as African compliance for the slave trade and being raped and impregnated by her slaveholder.
Part of Virago's Five Gold Reads: five reissues of significant titles representing fifty years of feminist publishing. Representing the 1980s, a stunning collection of poems from Grace Nichols, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2021
Passport to Here and There
- 64 pages
- 3 hours of reading
One of Britain's best-known and most popular Caribbean poets traces a journey that moves from the coastal memories of a Guyana childhood to life in Britain and her adoptive Sussex landscape, turning the ordinary into something vivid and memorable, most notably in a sonnet-sequence which grew out of a recent return trip to Guyana.
I have crossed an ocean : selected poems
- 191 pages
- 7 hours of reading
Grace Nichols' poetry has a gritty lyricism that addresses the transatlantic connections central to the Caribbean-British experience. Her work brings a mythic awareness and a sensuous musicality that is at the same time disquieting. Born and educated in Guyana, Grace Nichols moved to Britain in 1977. I Have Crossed an Ocean is a comprehensive selection spanning some 25 years of her writing.
