Grace Nichols wins £10,000 RSL Pioneer prize for poetry

Grace Nichols, the 76-year-old Guyana-born poet, has won the 2026 Royal Society of Literature Pioneer prize and its £10,000 award. The prize recognises women writers over 60 who broke through when the literary world was less open to them.

Nichols made her name with I Is a Long-Memoried Woman, which took the Commonwealth poetry prize in 1983, and The Fat Black Woman's Poems, published in 1984. Her poems have served as GCSE set texts for decades. She has written extensively for children as well as adults.

Who founded the prize and why?

Bernardine Evaristo, then president of the RSL, established the Pioneer prize last year. She donated the £100,000 she received from the 2025 Women's prize outstanding contribution award to fund it for 10 years. The award rotates between forms each year; this year it went to poetry.

The inaugural winner was the novelist, playwright and activist Maureen Duffy, who died in May.

Evaristo set out the prize's purpose at its launch: "It's very easy to forget the feminist struggles of the past and the intrepid women who paved the way for successive generations, and it's important to celebrate our trailblazers while they are still around to enjoy it."

What did the judges say?

Ruth Borthwick, chair of English PEN, led the judging panel. She called Nichols "one of our most important contemporary poets", who had developed "her own poetic language – an earthy mix of Creole and standard English".

"Grace showed the way for generations of poets from the diaspora to make the cultural connections between the Caribbean and Britain," Borthwick said.

Judge Sarah Howe, a poet, praised the winner in full: "Grace Nichols is a legend, a trailblazer in the truest sense. Her work spans continents and traditions, alive to orality and shapely on the page, light and weighty at once. Her work blends the rhythms and stories of her Caribbean heritage with a unique vision of modern Britain."

Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society and the third panellist, said Nichols "was probably the first poet who really lifted poetry off the page for me".

What is Nichols' body of work?

Born in Guyana, Nichols moved to the UK in 1977. Her poems draw on Guyanese folk tales, oral tradition, landscape and the history of slavery. She belonged to a group of West Indian poets whose work tackled racial tensions during the inflammatory immigration debates of Thatcher's Britain.

Her other collections include:

• Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989)
• Sunris (1996), winner of the Guyana poetry prize
• Startling the Flying Fish (2005)
• The novel Whole of a Morning Sky (1986)
• Children's books Come on Into My Tropical Garden (1988) and Give Yourself a Hug (1994)

Several of the children's titles were anthologies co-edited with her partner, fellow Guyanese poet John Agard.

What happens next?

Nichols said the call from Borthwick surprised her. "I am honoured and delighted to have the RSL Pioneer prize bestowed on me and grateful to poetry for all that it's given me, as well as to the judges and my parents who made books a part of our lives," she said.

A vice-president of the RSL, Nichols received the Queen's gold medal for poetry in 2021. Her next adult collection, The Tracks of My Name, appears on 19 November, and the British Library will host a celebration event on 1 March 2027.