On Stage
Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican-Irish heritage. Her work has been widely anthologised and broadcast on BBC Radio, TV and film and she consistently features at international book and poetry festivals.
Her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death was published by Canongate Books, winning the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the British Book Awards. A highly anticipated second novel set in the Mrs Death universe titled The Life Of Life is in production and will be published by Canongate in 2027.
Other recent books include literary childhood memoir, Springfield Road and two poetry collections Pessimism is for Lightweights: 30 Pieces of Courage and Resistance and With Love, Grief and Fury, which was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards and received a Special Commendation from The Poetry Book Society. Her poem Pessimism is for Lightweights is on permanent display at the People’s History Museum, Manchester. Recent performances of protest poems While Justice Waits and Dirty Old Men were Highly Commended by the Forward Poetry Prize. Her poetry and fiction has been added to the GSCE school syllabus and the Open University.
Salena Godden is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Patron of Hastings Book Festival and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex.