Dorothea Smartt

b. 1963

Dorothea Smartt was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019.

Dorothea Smartt, literary activist, live artist, and established poet with an international reputation. Born and raised in London she is described as a ‘Brit-born Bajan international’. Her years of experience, include engagements with the British Council in Bahrain, South Africa, USA, Egypt, and Hungary. In 2013 she was keynote speaker at Barbados’ Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award. She has two full collections, Connecting Medium and Ship Shape (Peepal Tree Press). Her recent chapbook, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings-On, “…is subversive, radical, and surprisingly panoramic. Ultimately…about Black diasporic love at its most radical and life-affirming.” She is currently researching a third full collection, where she continues to rework standard narratives, this time imagining same-sex relationships and cross-gender experiences among ‘West Indian’ workers building the Panama Canal.