Celebrated Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison has added another prestigious international honour to an already distinguished literary career, winning the 2026 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry for her ground-breaking new translation of the 14th-century classic, Dante’s Inferno.
Goodison, Jamaica’s first female Poet Laureate, serving from 2017 to 2020, receives the US$2,000 prize for a work that boldly transports Dante’s epic journey into a Caribbean landscape, drawing deeply on Jamaican language, culture, history and identity.
The annual Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, presented in partnership with the Derek Walcott Estate and the Derek Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, recognises a full-length book of poems by a living poet who is not a United States citizen, published during the previous calendar year.
