The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2019 awarded to Lorna Goodison

Published 18 December 2019

The Poetry Medal Committee has recommended Lorna Goodison as this year's recipient of The Queen's Award for Poetry, on the basis of the body of her work.

The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry Awarded to Lorna Goodison

The Gold Medal for Poetry was established by King George V in 1933 at the suggestion of the then Poet Laureate, John Masefield, and is awarded for excellence in poetry. Each year’s recipient is from the United Kingdom or a Commonwealth Realm.

Lorna Goodison is Jamaica’s Poet Laureate, and during her thirty-year career has published thirteen collections of poetry, as well as a selection of short stories. The medal will be presented by The Queen in an Audience at Buckingham Palace in 2020.

On receiving the award, she said:

“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.”

The Poetry Medal Committee is chaired by the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, who received The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2018.

The Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, said:

As Jamaica’s current Poet Laureate, and through the many literary honours she has received, Lorna Goodison has come to be recognised as a hugely significant and influential contemporary author both at home and internationally. Through poems rooted in her Caribbean heritage and upbringing she has created a body of enchanting, intelligent and socially aware poetry in the authentic registers of her own tongue.

Previous recipients of The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry:

1934 Laurence Whistler

1936 W H Auden

1940 Michael Thwaites

1952 Andrew Young

1953 Arthur Waley

1954 Ralph Hodgson

1955 Ruth Pitter

1956 Edmund Blunden

1957 Siegfried Sassoon

1959 Frances Cornford

1960 John Betjeman