Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison wins the 2026 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry with Dante’s Inferno. Her Inferno begins in Halfway Tree, a major intersection in Kingston. She has chosen Miss Lou as her guide, a poet who wrote her poems in the language Jamaicans speak every day.
“I burst into tears. I knew that was where the poem had to begin.” Lorna Goodison describes the moment she found her starting point. The place is called Halfway Tree. It’s a major transportation hub in St. Andrew, in the Kingston metropolitan area. She made it the gateway to Dante’s Inferno.
The book, Dante’s Inferno, has just been awarded the Walcott Prize. It was published in London by Carcanet on April 24, 2025, and later in Canada under the title The Inferno. Goodison retains Dante’s structure, with its 34 cantos and nine circles. But she writes in free verse, without set rhymes, and in the Jamaican vernacular. The gate of hell opens with “I am the way into the city of deep downpression.” “Downpression” is a word from Rastafarian slang meaning “oppression.”
Lorna Goodison, a painter who became a poet
Lorna Goodison was born in Kingston on August 1, 1947, Emancipation Day. She first trained as a painter at the Jamaica School of Art and then in New York. “Since I studied painting, I see things visually first,” she says. Her mother, a seamstress, plays a central role in her work.
Her poetry collection Oracabessa won a major Caribbean poetry prize,the OCM Bocas Prize, in 2014. In 2017, she became Jamaica’s first woman Poet Laureate, a position she held until 2020. She received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2019. In 2025, Dante’s Inferno was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, a major Canadian literary prize. Lorna Goodison now lives in British Columbia, but her book looks toward Kingston.
Miss Lou Takes Virgil's Place
In Dante’s work, it is the Latin poet Virgil who accompanies the traveler. In Goodison’s work, it is Louise Bennett-Coverley, known in Jamaica as Miss Lou. Born in Kingston in 1919 and died in 2006, she was a poet, folklorist, and broadcaster. She wrote in Patois, the language Jamaicans speak every day. Her poems helped establish this language as a true literary language.
“I couldn’t go through Jamaican hell with anyone other than a Jamaican woman,” explains Goodison. Her Miss Lou speaks like a mother, with proverbs and little admonitions. Everyday words weave their way through the circles, such as “bambye” (later) or “duppy” (spirit, ghost). Hell takes on the colors of the island. The red streams are a reminder of bauxite mining, the ore from which aluminum is extracted. In Limbo, the first circle of hell, Nanny of the Maroons, heroine of the resistance to slavery, and Marcus Garvey occupy the places that Dante reserved for the great minds of antiquity.
Derek Walcott was supposed to be the guide
The prize is named after Derek Walcott, who was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, on January 23, 1930, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. In Omeros, published in 1990, he had already adapted Homer’s epic to the Caribbean setting.
However, in an early draft of the first canto, Goodison had chosen him as her guide. “Derek wasn’t going to help me at that point,” she says today. In the final version of the book, Walcott finds himself in limbo. The poet who settled Homer in Saint Lucia thus meets the woman who settles Dante in Kingston.
2026 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry: What the Prize Honors
Established in 2019, the prize is awarded by Arrowsmith Press, in collaboration with the Derek Walcott Estate and the Derek Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. It honors a complete collection by a living, non-American poet, published in English or translated into English in the previous year. The prize is worth $2,000. Judge Rosanna Warren says that Lorna Goodison “has expanded and electrified the English language.”
Why This Victory Matters for Caribbean Literature
This prize is open to poets from around the world who write in English, and fifteen books were finalists this year. The winner is from Kingston, and it speaks like Kingston. This book takes one of the most famous texts in world literature and sets it in a Jamaican crossroads.
This is a move that Caribbean writers know well. Walcott set Homer in Saint Lucia. Goodison sets Dante in Jamaica. The Caribbean does not merely welcome the world’s great texts; it rewrites them with its own places, heroes, and language. This victory is also about language. Miss Lou has spent her life defending patois as a language of poetry. Today, a book in which her words resurface at every turn has been published in the United Kingdom and Canada, was a finalist for a major Canadian award, and went on to win an international prize.
Finally, the award itself tells the story of the region. A Jamaican book has won an award in the name of a Saint Lucian, with the support of a festival in Trinidad and Tobago. Three islands come together in a single story of poetry. Lorna Goodison is aiming to cover all three parts of the Divine Comedy, and a canto from Purgatory has already been published. It remains to be seen who will guide the traveler beyond Hell.
Frequently Asked Questions
Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison wins the prize with Dante’s Inferno, published in London by Carcanet on April 24, 2025, and released in Canada under the title The Inferno. The prize is worth $2,000.
The book keeps the structure of Dante’s Inferno, with its 34 cantos and nine circles, but is written in free verse and in the language of Jamaica. The Inferno begins at Halfway Tree, a major intersection in Kingston, and Miss Lou takes Virgil’s place as the guide.
The prize honors a complete collection by a living, non-American poet, published in English or translated into English during the previous year. It is awarded by Arrowsmith Press, in collaboration with the Derek Walcott Estate and the Derek Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.
