Congratulations to Karen McCarthy Woolf, FRSL who has won the 2024 Jerwood Prize for England.
Karen is a British Jamaican poet who has built a track record in delivering ecological poetry in line with her PhD research as Royal Holloway University. Her first collection An Aviary of Small Birds was shortlisted for the 2015 Best First Collection award of the Forward Prize and the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and chosen as an Observer poetry book of the month.
Aside from writing, Karen, has also performed her works at festivals in countries like America, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Italy, and China. Her works have been translated into Turkish, Swedish, Spanish, Polish and Dutch, produced as animated and choreographed short film, exhibited by Poems on the Underground.
Karen also writes for radio and recent highlights include a multi-authored adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando which was nominated for a BBC Audio Award in 2020 and a reversion of Homer’s Book of the Dead in which Odysseus was reimagined as a London cab driver for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week.
She has served as Chair and Judge of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize several times and was a judge of the National Poetry Competition in 2021 which made literary history when the panel awarded the prize to a black writer for the first time in 40 years.
Karen’s book Top Doll (Dialogue, 2024) was also shortlisted for the 2024 T S Eliot Prize. She’s one of the figures that has kept the British black literature relevant.
