Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. Top Doll (Dialogue, 2024), shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize is the story of an entitled porcelain doll who struggles to cope with reality when her billionaire recluse owner is admitted to hospital. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and author of two poetry collections, An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014) and Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet, 2017), which was awarded an inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry.
As a Fulbright postdoctoral Scholar at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA, her research explored poetry, language and law, all concerns which inspired her forthcoming collection Un/Safe (Bloomsbury, 2025). She is co-editor with Mona Arshi of Nature Matters (Faber, 2025), an anthology of new nature poems from global majority perspectives.
