Available Formats
The Fat Black Woman's Poems: From the winner of the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry 2021
By (Author) Grace Nichols
Little, Brown Book Group
Virago Press Ltd
21st September 1998
13th September 1984
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
811
Paperback
96
Width 124mm, Height 196mm, Spine 4mm
74g
Grace Nichols gives us images that stare us straight in the eye, images of joy, challenge, accusation. Her 'fat black woman' is brash; rejoices in herself; poses awkward questions to politicians, rulers, suitors, to a white world that still turns its back. Grace Nichols writes in a language that is wonderfully vivid yet economical of the pleasures and sadnesses of memory, of loving, of 'the power to be what I am, a woman, charting my own futures'.
'Deliciously inert and self-contented, the fat black woman mocks oppression by the scandal of being herself. Inside this slim collection there is a fat woman not even fighting to get out' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'Run naturally and economically off the tongue. Beneath the folk rhythms and the lyrical simplicities, Nichols's poems preach disquiet' OBSERVER
Born in 1950 in Guyana, where she grew up, Grace Nichols worked as a jounalist and reporter. She came to Britain in 1977 and has published several children's books. Her cycle of poems, I IS A LONG MEMORIED WOMAN, won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize.