Grace Nichols Wins the 2026 RSL Pioneer Prize

Grace Nichols has won the 2026 RSL Pioneer Prize, a £10,000 award for pioneering British women writers, the Royal Society of Literature announced. The society will mark the prize at the British Library on Monday, March 1, 2027, the same announcement said.

The prize celebrates pioneering British women writers across genres, "especially in the past when it was more difficult for women to have successful careers as writers," the Royal Society of Literature said. This year's prize is for poetry.

The poet

Nichols, a Guyanese poet, is a fellow and vice-president of the society. She won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1983 for I is a Long-Memoried Woman, the announcement said. The Fat Black Woman's Poems is among the adult collections gathered in her 2010 Bloodaxe retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems, the same page said. She received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2021, it added. The society described her as one of the few poets widely studied on the GCSE syllabus for several decades, and as the author of many books for adults and for children.

This year's judges were chaired by Ruth Borthwick, chair of English PEN and formerly chief executive and artistic director of Arvon. The other judges were the poet, academic and editor Sarah Howe, and Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society since 2008, the announcement said.

What she said

Nichols said: "It was a wonderful surprise when Ruth Borthwick, one of the judges of the Pioneer Prize rang to say that I was the recipient of this year's Prize." She said the word pioneer sent her back to a month of national service before graduation at the University of Guyana, in military uniform, as part of a government plan for a hydro project in a forested region, and then to the work of writing: "Maybe that's what we do as poets in the act of writing a poem or book, we're like pioneers embarking on a new adventure with language in the forest of the imagination, finding a path true to our essential voice and vision, lighting things up from our own perspective."

Sarah Howe said: "Grace Nichols is a legend, a trailblazer in the truest sense." Judith Palmer thanked her for a career that has made more readers feel poetry is a place they might belong.

Her next book, The Tracks of My Name, will be published by Bloodaxe on November 19, 2026, and is her 10th collection of adult poems, the society said. It is a Poetry Book Society Choice. Nichols is due at the PBS Autumn Showcase in Newcastle on November 11, the announcement said.

How the prize is paid for

Bernardine Evaristo, president emerita of the society, founded the prize last year by giving away the £100,000 from her Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award, money meant to fund the prize over ten years, the announcement said. That award marked the 30th anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction, the page said. Bukhman Philanthropies, which had supported the Women's Prize honour, matched the £100,000, it added.

Evaristo said: "It felt right that I should share this substantial and unexpected windfall with other older women writers as a way to acknowledge their pioneer spirits and achievements." Daria Bukhman, co-founder and chair of Bukhman Philanthropies, said the match is there so the prize can honor trailblazing women writers "for the next decade."

Photo: Grace Nichols at the British Library in October 2022. Photo by The British Library, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.