GRACE NICHOLS was born in 1950 in Georgetown, Guyana, where she grew up. She took a Diploma in Communications from the University of Guyana and worked as a reporter and freelance journalist. She came to Britain in 1977 and since then has published a number of children's books and collections of poetry. Her first, I is a long memoried woman, was the winner of the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and her second, The Fat Black Woman's Poems was published by Virago in 1984, Grace Nichols lives in Lewes, Sussex, with poet John Agard. In Whole of A Morning Sky, her first adult novel, Grace Nichols richly and imaginatively evokes a world that was a part of her own Guyanese childhood. In 2007 she became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.