Salena Godden in Southampton - Friday 24th October

 Award-winning novelist, poet Salena Godden at The Attic Southampton - Friday 24th October

Salena Godden has grown to become one of Britain’s foremost poets whose electrifying live performances have earned her a devoted following.

Salena Godden at The Attic Southampton

Some recent performance highlights have included headline spots with March For Women, Trafalgar Square; Superjam at The British Library with The Last Poets and Saul Williams; Green Gathering; Edinburgh International Book Festival; Out-Spoken at The Southbank; WOMAD; Letters Live at The Royal Albert Hall; Crossing Borders Festival, The Hague; Shakespeare and Co. Paris; Workman’s Club, Dublin; Windrush 75 at The Royal Albert Hall for BBC Radio 2.

Indie Book Awards winner Salena Godden in Southampton

Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning novelist, poet and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican and Irish heritage. 

Her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death was published by Canongate in 2021, it won the Indie Book Awards for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. 

A hardback edition of Pessimism is for Lightweights - 30 Pieces of Courage and Resistance was published by Rough Trade Books in 2023. The title poem is on permanent display at The Peoples History Museum in Manchester. A new full poetry collection With Love, Grief and Fury and literary childhood memoir Springfield Road - A Poets Childhood Revisited were published with Canongate in May 2024.

Most recently her poem While Justice Waits was highly commended by the Forward Prize and live performances from With Love, Grief and Fury were broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s The Verb and Pick of The Week. New commissioned work — a short story Rapier is published by Callaloo Literary Journal in May 2025, and another short story, I am Hagstone will feature in Bog People - A Working Class Anthology Of Folk Horror in October 2025. Her highly anticipated second novel set in the Mrs Death Misses Death universe, The Life Of Life will be published by Canongate in 2026. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Patron of Hastings Book Festival and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex.