John Agard was born in 1949 and grew up in Georgetown, Guyana. He began writing poetry in his teenage years and taught English and French after leaving school, as well as becoming a writer and editor for the Guyana Sunday Chronicle. Agard moved to England in 1977 with his partner, the poet Grace Nichols, ending up in Ironbridge, Shropshire. He and Nichols currently live in Lewes, East Sussex.
Agard’s poetry is known for blending incisive socio-cultural commentary and criticism with a playful sense of humor. Among his published works, which number upwards of 50, are Man to Pan (1982), winner of Cuba’s prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize; Lend Me Your Wings (1998), shortlisted for the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize; and The Young Inferno (2009), winner of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education Poetry Award. Agard, who writes children’s literature as well as poetry, is a recipient of the 2012 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the 2021 BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award, a Cholmondeley Award, and a Paul Hamlyn Award for Poetry. He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.
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Photo by Sara Roque Peres.