Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL writes poetry, essays, memoir and fiction.

She is co-editor of Nature Matters (Faber, 2025, with Mona Arshi) and her experimental verse novel Top Doll (Dialogue, 2024) is a TS Eliot Prize shortlisted, Guardian Poetry Book of the Year.

A Fellow of the Complete Works, she is the winner of the Jerwood/RSL Poetry Award for England (2024), a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar and her second collection Seasonal Disturbances, explores urban nature, the city and the sacred. Other highlights include a commission for Greenpeace where her poetry was part of an action at the ICJ in the Hague. She teaches Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.