Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL is a poet, editor, essayist and librettist. Her novel in verse, Top Doll, was a Guardian Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA she was the inaugural poet in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. In 2025, she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England).