Salena Godden
Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican-Irish heritage. Her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted at the British Book Awards and for the Gordon Burn Prize. Her most recent books include the literary childhood memoir, Springfield Road and poetry collections Pessimism is for Lightweights and With Love, Grief and Fury, which was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Award and received a Special Commendation from The Poetry Book Society. ‘Dirty Old Men’, published in WLGF, was highly commended by the Forward Poetry Prize 2025 in the Best Single Poem - Performed category. Her work has been shortlisted for the 4thWrite Short Story Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, Jerwood Compton Foundation and the Bridport Poetry Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Patron of Hastings Book Festival and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex.
salenagodden.co.uk | @salena.godden
Salena Godden, author of Mrs Death Misses Death, reads an extract from Mrs Death’s story of The Red Tower at the Durham Book Festival.
‘“I would read an excerpt in Edinburgh and the idea of Mrs Death would be met with a cheer and a ‘yay!’. And exactly the same excerpt down in Bloomsbury [would have] everyone crying, me crying, big hugs at the end … What it has got me thinking is, I wonder if there is a geography of mourning, a geography of grief.” All the reactions are welcome, though. She still thinks one of the scariest things about death is that it is so often surrounded by silence.’
Taboo-busting poet Salena Godden talks to the Guardian about her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death, missing performing and why Brits struggle to speak about her novel’s all too timely subject.
Katy Guest
Guardian
Salena speaks to Nihal Arthanayake about Mrs Death Misses Death
‘Told in sparse, affecting prose interspersed with poetry, Godden produces a thought-provoking novel that travels across time and place to question the value of life, the experiences of womanhood, and grief in all its forms.’
The Observer
‘Without Death You Wouldn't Live’ – Salena Godden on Writing her Debut
‘As the early drafts of the book developed I started collecting deaths, near deaths and unmourned deaths, invisible deaths and celebrity death and writing about them. I also started testing the work out at my poetry gigs. I’d slip an excerpt of the book into my poetry shows to see how Mrs Death landed with my poetry friends and with spoken word and book festival audiences. I began to notice different responses in different cities and different counties … I’m fascinated by this and hope to examine it further: I wonder if here in the UK we exhibit grief and talk about death and mourn a little differently county by county? Do we mourn differently geographically?’
Salena Godden is featured on the Waterstones blog about writing her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, and how we respond to death across the country.
Salena Godden
Waterstones
