Grace Atkinson is an award-winning poet and facilitator from East London. She was awarded the Derby Poetry Festival Poetry Prize in 2026, as well as the Streetcake Experimental Writing Prize in 2021. Grace was longlisted for the Out Spoken Prize in 2023. Her work has appeared in Stand, The Rialto, Bath Magg, The North, Spoonfeed, Poetry Salzburg Review, Leslie, t’ART, among others, and she was interviewed by Dazed Magazine. She completed an MFA in Poetry at Manchester Writing School in 2019, and has read alongside poets such as former UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Hera Lindsay Bird.

This year Grace was selected as Poet Educator for Southbank Centre’s Imagine the Future, working alongside Lemn Sissay and with over eighty schools across Lambeth. The project concluded an ambitious public installation across the Southbank Centre’s facade. In 2024, Grace completed a residency with the University of Sheffield, exploring the influence of sports culture in Tottenham. That year she also was invited by her local station, South Tottenham, to write a poem marking the opening of the new Suffragette Overground line.