Grace Nichols was born and brought up in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. This country is in mainland South America but it is culturally more similar to a Caribbean country. After working there as a teacher and a journalist she came to Britain in 1977. Her novel Whole of a Morning Sky gives a taste of this period of her life.

Within a few years she had published several volumes of poetry, including I Is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), a cycle of poems which looks at the way Caribbean women survive their sometimes difficult and often oppressed lives. Amongst other awards, this collection won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. The collection best known to teachers and pupils is The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984). This was followed by Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), Sunris: New Poems (1996), and most recently Startling the Flying Fish (2005).

Her verse uses both Jamaican patois (or Creole) and standard English and looks at the lives and culture of black women in a form which combines musical qualities of rhythm and rhyme, sharply-aimed humour and an engaging directness. ‘I like working on both standard English and Creole. I tend to want to fuse the two tongues because I come from a background where the two worlds are constantly interacting, though Creole was regarded, obviously, as the inferior by the colonial powers when I was growing up.’ In Grace Nichols’s own words Creole is ‘... the language our foremothers and forefathers struggled to create (in the Caribbean) after losing their own (African) languages on the plantations and we are saying that it’s a valid, vibrant language.... We don’t just see Creole as a dialect of English even though the words themselves are English-based, because the structure, rhythm, and intonation are an influence of West African speech.’

'I don’t think the only reason I use Creole in my poetry is to preserve it. However, I find it genuinely exciting. Some Creole expressions are very vivid and concise and have no equivalent in English.'