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Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning writer, novelist, poet, memoirist and broadcaster of Jamaican and Irish mixed heritage based in London. Her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize 2022, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize and it featured in the Guardian books of the year list 2021. Her work has been widely anthologised and broadcast on BBC radio, TV and film.

Pessimism is for Lightweights – 30 Pieces of Courage and Resistance was published in a hardback edition by Rough Trade Books in February 2023. It features revised and new material, an introduction by John Higgs and an Old English translation of the title poem by Emily Cotman. The poem Pessimism is for Lightweights was a pubic poetry art piece on display at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 2017. The poem has since been donated to The Peoples History Museum in Manchester where it is now on permanent display. It was unveiled on  February 2020 as part of the museum’s 10 year anniversary celebrations. 

She was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. In the summer of 2023 Godden was invited to become a Patron of Hastings Book Festival alongside poet Henry Normal and author Patrice Lawrence. Also in summer 2023 Godden was made an Honorary Fellow of West Dean in Sussex.

Godden has had several volumes of poetry published including Under The Pier (Nasty Little Press 2011) Fishing in the Aftermath: Poems 1994-2014  (Burning Eye Books 2014) Pessimism is for Lightweights – 13 Pieces of Courage and Resistance (Rough Trade Books 2018) plus also a literary childhood memoir, Springfield Road  (Unbound 2014). She has produced four studio albums to date – her solo performance poetry album LIVEwire (Nymphs and Thugs) was shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Prize.

May 2024 saw the publication of her most recent poetry collection, With Love, Grief and Fury alongside her previously published memoir Springfield Road with Canongate. With Love, Grief and Fury is a culmination of passion and emotions manifested in love poems for people and the planet, grief poems brimming with compassion, and poems of fury and fire that will kick some ass, tell the truth and inspire change and hope. 

Mrs Death Misses Death

Mrs Death has had enough. She is exhausted from spending eternity doing her job and now she seeks someone to unburden her conscience to. Wolf Willeford, a troubled young writer, is well acquainted with death, but until now hadn’t met Death in person – a black, working-class woman who shape-shifts and does her work unseen. Enthralled by her stories, Wolf becomes Mrs Death’s scribe, and begins to write her memoirs.

With Love, Grief and Fury

With Love, Grief and Fury contains love poems, for people and the planet; grief poems brimming with compassion, sharing tears and mourning what was and contemplating what could be; and poems of fire and fury that will kick some ass, tell the truth and inspire change and hope.

Springfield Road: A Poet’s Childhood Revisited

A moving and poetic memoir about growing up without a father and a vivid portrait of the seventies. It evokes an era when oranges seemed bigger and summers were longer, a world of half-penny sweets, free school milk, hand-me-downs and Thatcher’s Britain, for those too young to remember and for those old enough to know. For Salena, it was a time for learning that life can be brutal with first betrayals and first losses, but also that there are endless riches to uncover in the world.