Home / Tutors / Salena Godden

Salena Godden

Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning novelist, poet and broadcaster of Jamaican-Irish mixed heritage. Her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death won the Indie Book Awards for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. Her new full poetry collection With Love, Grief and Fury and literary childhood memoir Springfield Road – A Poets Childhood Revisited were published with Canongate with a double book launch in May 2024. Her work has been widely published, anthologised and broadcast on BBC radio, TV and film. Salena Godden is one of Britain’s foremost contemporary poets whose electrifying live performances have earned her a devoted following. A second novel set in the Mrs Death Misses Death universe is due for publication with Canongate in spring 2026. Rough Trade Books published a hardback edition of Pessimism is for Lightweights – 30 pieces of Courage and Resistance in 2023. The title poem is on permanent display at The Peoples History Museum, Manchester. Her poem ‘While Justice Waits’ was highly commended and published by The Forward Prize 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex. She is a Patron of Hastings Book Festival and patron of LIVEwire Poetry — a new UK poetry organisation specialising in writer development and live events. A consistent supporter of the work of other poets, writers and artists, Salena Godden co-hosts a monthly arts and culture radio show and podcast Roaring 20’s Radio for Soho Radio with art journalist Amah-Rose Abrams and poet Matt Abbott.