Build your child’s reading confidence at home with books at the right level Learn all about the strange goings on in Cotton Tree Village with these four traditional tales from the Caribbean, beautifully told here by award-winning authors, John Agard and Grace Nichols. Emerald/Band 15 books provide a widening range of genres including science fiction and biography, prompting more ways to respond to texts. Text type: Traditional tales from another culture Curriculum links: English: fairy stories, myths and legends; books from other cultures and traditions This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

Grace Nichols' poetry has a gritty lyricism that addresses the transatlantic connections central to the Caribbean-British experience. Her work brings a mythic awareness and a sensuous musicality that is at the same time disquieting. Born and educated in Guyana, Grace Nichols moved to Britain in 1977. I Have Crossed an Ocean is a comprehensive selection spanning some 25 years of her writing. Her later collections are not covered by this selection: Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009), The Insomnia Poems (2017) and Passport from Here to There (2020).

This book is part of Wordsmith, the complete programme for all your Primary English teaching needs.

Build your child's reading confidence at home with books at the right level In these two animal stories from the Caribbean, find out in the first why Tiger wanted to get rid of all the other animals and keep the jungle for himself and what clever Anansi did about it, and in the second how shy Owl nearly lost everything because he didn't have the courage to show his face. Topaz/Band 13 books offer longer and more demanding reads for children to investigate and evaluate. Text type: Two stories from another culture. The feelings roller coaster for Owl on pages 30-31 help children to discuss the different emotions addressed in the story. Curriculum links: Geography: Passport to the world; Citizenship: Living in a diverse world; ICT: Combining text and graphics. This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

In The Insomnia Poems Grace Nichols explores those nocturnal hours when Sleep (the thief who nightly steals your brain) is hard to come by, and the politics of the day hard to shut out, never mind the lavender-scented pillow. Here memories of her own Guyana childhood mingle with the sleeping spectres of dreams and folk legends such as Sleeping Beauty. A lyrical interweaving of tones and textures invites the reader into the zones between sleep and no-sleep, between the solitude of the dark and the awakening of the light. The Insomnia Poems was Grace Nichols's first new collection since Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009). Neither that collection nor this one is included in her Bloodaxe retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010).

In Passport to Here and There Grace Nichols traces a journey that moves from the coastal memories of a Guyana childhood to life in Britain and her adoptive Sussex landscape. In these movingly redemptive and celebratory poems, she embraces connections and re-connections, with the ability to turn the ordinary into something vivid and memorable whether personal or public, contemporary or historical, most notably in a sonnet-sequence which grew out of a recent return trip to Guyana. Her ninth collection of adult poems and her fourth book with Bloodaxe, Passport to Here and There makes a significant contribution both to Caribbean and to British poetry. Our Demerara voices rising and falling growing more and more golden like a canefield's metamorphosis from shoots into sugar -- the crystal memory shared with a river… Passport to Here and There is Grace Nichols's third new collection since her Bloodaxe retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010), following Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009) and The Insomnia Poems (2017). It is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

A wonderful anthology of poetry by award winning poets John Agard and Grace Nichols, brought to life with beautiful illustrations by Satoshi Kitamura. Purple/Band 8 books offer developing readers literary language, with some challenging vocabulary. Text type: A poetry book. An illustration on pages 22 and 23 encourages children to recap the poems they have read in the anthology. Curriculum links: Art and Design: Portraying relationships; Music: Play it again - exploring rhythmic patterns; Citizenship: Living in a diverse world

Art, landscape, and memory are interwoven strands in the fabric of Grace Nichols' latest collection, Picasso, I Want My Face Back. The book opens with a long poem in the voice of Dora Maar, who, as Picasso's muse and mistress, was the inspiration for his iconic painting, The Weeping Woman. The poems are almost interlocking reflections that echo the cubist manner of the painting and allow us to enter the shifting surfaces of Dora Maar's mind and her journey of self reclamation.

A stunning collection of poems from Grace Nichols, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2021 Beauty is a fat black woman walking the fields pressing a breezed hibiscus to her cheek while the sun lights up her feet Nichols gives us images that stare us straight in the eye, images of joy, challenge, accusation. Her 'fat black woman' is brash; rejoices in herself; poses awkward questions to politicians, rulers, suitors, to a white world that still turns its back. Grace Nichols writes in a language that is wonderfully vivid yet economical of the pleasures and sadnesses of memory, of loving, of 'the power to be what I am, a woman, charting my own futures'. 'Unquestionably one of our most important living poets' i-D magazine 'Not only rich music, an easy lyricism, but also grit, and earthy honesty, a willingness to be vulnerable and clean' Gwendolyn Brooks 'Beneath the folk rhythms and the lyrical simplicities, Nichols's poems preach disquiet' Observer 'Grace Nichols has wit, acidity, tenderness, any number of gifts at her disposal' Jeanette Winterson

'Beneath the folk rhythms and the lyrical simplicities, Nichols's poems preach disquiet' OBSERVER 'Not only rich music, an easy lyricism, but also grit, and earthy honesty, a willingness to be vulnerable and clean' GWENDOLYN BROOKS 'Grace Nichols has wit, acidity, tenderness, any number of gifts at her disposal' JEANETTE WINTERSON Celebrating five decades of the feminist publisher, each of the Five Gold Reads represents an iconic moment in Virago's history, from the 1970s to today. A stunning collection of poems from Grace Nicholas, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2021 Nichols gives us images that stare us straight in the eye, images of joy, challenge, accusation. Her 'fat black woman' is brash; rejoices in herself; poses awkward questions to politicians, rulers, suitors. In other sequences of this collection, Grace Nichols writes in a language that is wonderfully vivid yet economical of the pleasures and sadnesses of memory, of loving, of 'the power to be what I am, a woman, charting my own futures'.

'There is something holy about Georgetown at dusk. The Atlantic curling the shoreline . . .' The first adult novel from Grace Nichols, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2021. It is 1960 and the Walcotts are moving into the city from the village of Highdam. School headmaster Archie Walcott knows that he will miss the openness of pastureland; his wife, Clara, the women and their nourishing 'womantalk and roots magic; and Gem, their daughter, her loved jamoon and mango trees. Their move into the rough and tumble Charlestown neighbourhood couldn't have come at a worse time, for the serenity of the city is exploded by political upheavals in the country's struggle for independence. Undercover moves - CIA-backed and supported by Britain attempt to bring down the Marxist government. Along with the sweep of events - strikes, riots, and racial dashes - daily life in the Charlestown yard and beyond gathers its own intensity. Archie's friend, Conrad, seeing and knowing all, moves with ease among the opposing groups, monocle to his eye, white mice in his pockets; through one terrible night the neighbourhood tenses as the Ramsammy's rum shop is threatened with burning; and Archie, troubled by the times, tries to keep a tight rein on his family. Young Gem, ever-watchful, responds with wonderment and curiosity to the new life around her. In this, her first adult novel, Grace Nichols richly and imaginatively evokes a world that was part of her own Guyanese childhood.