Lorna Gaye Goodison was born on 1 August 1947 and is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer, whose career spans four decades.
19 Facts About Lorna Goodison
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Lorna Goodison was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017, serving in the role until 2020.
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In 2019, Lorna Goodison was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
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Lorna Gaye Goodison was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on 1 August 1947, her birthday coinciding with Emancipation Day.
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Lorna Goodison was educated at St Hugh's High School, a leading Anglican high school in Jamaica, and studied at the Jamaica School of Art, before going on to the Art Students League of New York, where she studied under African-American painter Jacob Lawrence.
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Lorna Goodison states that Derek Walcott was a major influence on her writing.
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Lorna Goodison began to publish under her own name in the Jamaica Journal, and to give readings.
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Tamarind Season was followed in 1986 by I Am Becoming My Mother, for which Lorna Goodison received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Americas.
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Lorna Goodison's persuasive art is a many-sided celebration of spiritual search.
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Lorna Goodison has published three collections of short stories, Baby Mother and the King of Swords, Fool-Fool Rose Is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah, and By Love Possessed.
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Lorna Goodison's work has appeared widely in magazines, has been translated into many languages and over the past 25 years has been included in such anthologies as Daughters of Africa, 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.
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Poet and literary scholar Edward Baugh says "one of Lorna Goodison's achievements is that her poetry inscribes the Jamaican sensibility and culture on the text of the world".
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Also an artist, Lorna Goodison has exhibited her paintings internationally, and her own artwork is usually featured on the covers of her books.
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In 2013, Lorna Goodison was awarded the Jamaican national honour of the Order of Distinction in the rank of Commander, "for outstanding achievements in Literature and Poetry".
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In 2015, Lorna Goodison was honoured by the University of Michigan with its Shirley Verrett Award; given to "a faculty member whose work encourages the advancement of women of color in the arts", the award was created in 2011 in tribute to former University professor and renowned opera singer Shirley Verrett.
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In 2017, Lorna Goodison was invested as the second official poet laureate of Jamaica, after Mervyn Morris, becoming the first woman to hold the title.
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Lorna Goodison marked her first Emancipation Day in the role with a poem "In Celebration of Emancipation", which commemorates the end of enslavement of African peoples in Jamaica.
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In 2020, Lorna Goodison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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In 2023, Lorna Goodison was honoured as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer, an annual life-long award recognising the contribution of writers across the globe to literature.