Lorna Goodison is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica, and a major figure in world literature.
She is the author of nine collections of poetry, three collections of short stories and an award-winning memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People. Her Collected Poems was published in 2017. Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures is her first collection of essays and was published by Myriad in August 2018.
Her many awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica and the Windham Campbell Literature Prize. Her work is included in major anthologies of contemporary poetry and has been translated into many languages. She is a central figure at literary festivals throughout the world.
Born in Jamaica, Lorna Goodison now lives in Canada. She is Professor Emerita at University of Michigan, where she was the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017, a position she will hold until 2020.
Interviews and Features
The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2019 awarded to Lorna Goodison
Lorna Goodison, Jamaican poet laureate and author of Redemption Ground, is the 2019 recipient of The Queen’s Medal for Poetry, following in the footsteps of Simon Armitage, John Betjeman and W H Auden.
“I am honoured and deeply grateful. As one of a generation of Commonwealth writers whose engagement with poetry began with a need to write ourselves and our people into English Literature, I feel blessed. And as a Jamaican poet who has always felt that my ancestors too are deserving of odes and praise songs, and who did not see them in what I was given to read, I am glad that I set out to write these poems.
“Love and justice, hope and possibility, healing and redemption are the themes I’ve always turned to, and that this enterprise has led to my being placed in the company of the memorable poets who have been awarded this medal before me is truly humbling.” Lorna Goodison
You can read Lorna’s essays and poems in her latest collection, Redemption Ground.
Interview with Jenni Murray on Woman‘s Hour, BBC Radio 4
The first female Poet Laureate of Jamaica Lorna Goodison talks to Jenni Murray about her love of poetry, being taught by Derek Walcott, and how she decided to invent ‘adventures’ as a new literary genre for Redemption Ground, which Jenni describes as ‘a beautiful book… absolutely splendid.’
You can listen again here.
Interview with Jo Good on BBC Radio London
Laughter and tears as BBC Radio London’s presenter Jo Good is ‘blown away’ by ‘the wonderful Lorna Goodison’ talking about her childhood in Jamaica and decision to become a poet, and reading the elegy to her mother. As Jo says, ‘Lorna Goodison writes lyrically and decisively. Redemption Ground absolutely blew me away… it is quite extraordinary, like an arrow in the heart.’
You can listen again here.