Karen McCarthy Woolf, FRSL, is the author of three poetry collections and editor of seven literary anthologies. A postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA, she was poet-in-residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, where she wrote her latest collection, Unsafe (Bloomsbury, 2026). In 2025 she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the RSL Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England).
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf, FRSL, PhD, is the author of three poetry collections and editor of seven literary anthologies. Her novel in verse, Top Doll, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and her début, An Aviary of Small Birds was an Observer Book of the Year. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA she was poet in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, where she wrote her latest collection, Unsafe (Bloomsbury, 2026): a poetic meditation on the sacred, the city and our access to nature. In 2025 she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the RSL Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England). She has performed her work everywhere from The Royal Festival Hall, Kings Place and Barbican, to venues across Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Her poems are translated into Croatian, Dutch, Italian, Macedonian, Spanish and Turkish; have been exhibited by Poems on the Underground; produced as animation and dance; and dropped from a helicopter over the Houses of Parliament in a poetry 'bombing' by the Chilean collective Casagrande.
