Karen McCarthy Woolf

Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. Her verse novel Top Doll was a Guardian Book of the Year and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Jhalak Prizes. She was a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar and writer in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, UCLA and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and winner of the Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England). She has edited numerous literary anthologies, including Nature Matters: Vital Poems of the Global Majority (Faber, 2025). Her poetry has been translated into Swedish, Spanish, Dutch and Italian, produced as animation and dance; exhibited by Poems on the Underground across the London tube network and dropped from a helicopter over the Houses of Parliament. She is currently writing a libretto for a new collaboration with BBC Radio 3.