Tracks of My Name

The Tracks of My Name sees Grace Nichols embarking on a journey across the English countryside to the small town of Olney in Buckinghamshire. Olney was where the one-time English slave-trader (later abolitionist) John Newton lived and wrote his famous hymn, Amazing Grace which inspired her Guyanese Methodist parents to name her Grace Olney after both hymn and place. A narrative sequence that reads as a personal quest, The Tracks of My Name lyrically and imaginatively explores the relationship between memory and history, conscience and greed, a sense of place and love of landscape, through her own distinctive way of viewing the world. Even when confronting some of the more unsavoury aspects of Empire, she makes a space for redemption, continuing the interweave between her Guyanese/Caribbean and British heritages.The Tracks of My Name is Grace Nichols's fourth new collection with Bloodaxe since her retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010), following Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009), The Insomnia Poems (2017) and Passport to Here and There (2020). She was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2021. Her poetry is studied in UK schools as part of the GCSE National Curriculum. The Tracks of My Name is the Poetry Book Society Choice for Winter 2026.

Born in Guyana, Grace Nichols has lived in Britain since 1977. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Most of that book is included in her later retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems (2010). Four subsequent poetry collections were published by Virago: The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), Sunris (1996), winner of the Guyana Prize, and Startling the Flying Fish (2006), poems which tell the story of the Caribbean. Her later books from Bloodaxe are Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009); I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems (2010); The Insomnia Poems (2017); Passport to Here and There (2020), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation; and The Tracks of My Name (2026), the Poetry Book Society Choice for winter 2026. She has also published several poetry books for younger readers, including Come on into My Tropical Garden (1988), Give Yourself a Hug (1994), Everybody Got a Gift (2005) and Cosmic Disco (2013). She lives in Sussex with the poet John Agard and their family. She was made a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020. Grace Nichols received The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2021 from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle in 2022.