Lorna Goodison

Lorna Goodison is a major figure in world literature. She was the first female poet laureate of Jamaica 2017-2020, and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2019. She has won many awards for her work, including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry from Yale University and one of Canada’s largest literary prizes, the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007).

Goodison has written fifteen collections of poetry and three collections of short stories, and her poems have been included in major anthologies and collections of contemporary poetry such as the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, the HarperCollins World Reader, the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, and Longman Masters of British Literature. Her Collected Poems was published in 2017 by Carcanet, and her work has also been translated into many languages, with individual collections of poetry in German, French, and Spanish.

Over the past thirty five years she has garnered wide international attention, and she has been a central figure at literary festivals throughout the world. Her latest book is a new translation of Dante’s Inferno in the Jamaican language she grew up with, following Dante’s own use of his Florentine dialect instead of the Latin that was conventional for great poetry in his time. Lorna’s Inferno has had international acclaim from Italian as well as English speaking readers around the world, and many have praised it for its timely insight into our own troubled times. It was published by Carcanet Press.

Lorna Goodison is Professor Emerita at University of Michigan, where she was the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She holds honorary degrees from the University of the West Indies, the University of Toronto, and the University of Durham, and lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia, with her husband Ted Chamberlin.