We're delighted to share Salena Godden as our Special Commendation for Winter 2025.
Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican-Irish heritage. Her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize. ‘Dirty Old Men’, published in WLGF, was highly commended by the Forward Poetry Prize 2025 in the Best Single Poem - Performed category.
Her most recent poetry collection, With Love, Grief and Fury (Canongate) was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Award and received a Special Commendation from us here at the Poetry Book Society.
Godden is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Patron of Hastings Book Festival and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex.
Photo credit: Beccy Strong