“The dolls had found me. There was something magical about the whole thing. I was the conduit; they were the storytellers!”
Poet, novelist
What does nature mean to me
‘Mum, who was partially sighted, would spend time with me working partly as her eyes, identifying plants in gardens and on the side of the road: ragwort, yarrow, thistles, pennyroyal for period pains, rue brought on menstruation.’
On finding ideas
‘She spoke to hardly anyone except her vast collection of antique dolls, and constructed a bizarre hierarchy between porcelain, rag and plastic dolls that mirrors the real-life absurdities of race.’
Why do I write?
‘I wrote to transform a profound grief. I clung to the natural environment, to the sea, the horizon, trees. They seemed permanent, something that couldn’t be lost or taken from me.’
Karen McCarthy Woolf in conversation with Gabriel Gbadamosi
‘I wrote on a boat in the middle of the Thames, an experience of being held in the water, neither north nor south. I’m always attempting a fusion of opposites, of multiplicities, trying to write music with words.’
Biography
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.
