The Queen Sparkles in Diamonds and Gold at Windsor Castle

The Queen welcomed the celebrated poet Grace Nichols to Windsor Castle to present her with a special award. Nichols was born in Guyana but immigrated to the United Kingdom in the 1970s. She has written numerous books of poetry, and she has received significant recognition for her work over the past four decades.

On Wednesday, the Queen presented Nicholas with the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. The award is given to a notable book of verse published by someone from the Commonwealth. Established by King George V in 1933 to recognize works of British poetry, but in the 1980s the scope of the award was broadened to include Commonwealth poets.

Notable past recipients of the medal are a who’s who of classic British poets, including names like W. H. Auden, Siegfried Sassoon, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, and Ted Hughes. Nichols’s most recent book of poems, Passport to Here and There, was published in 2020.

Here’s a closer view of the medal, which features a portrait of the crowned Queen.

For the presentation, the Queen wore a brooch that has quickly become a personal favorite over the past decade: the Bird of Paradise Jubilee Brooch. The intricate gold and diamond brooch was a Diamond Jubilee gift to the Queen from government of Singapore in 2012. The piece is a traditional Peranakan-style brooch, made by Singapore-based jeweler Thomis Kwan.

The brooch is only partially visible in the photographs from Wednesday’s audience, but here’s an excellent close-up view of the piece, taken during the Queen’s visit to National Institute of Agricultural Botany in 2019. The shape of the brooch, coincidentally, nicely echoes the shape of the medal.

With the brooch, the Queen wore a slightly different set of pearls than her usual daytime suite. Instead of her pearl and diamond earrings, she’s wearing simple pearl studs. And she’s switched out her three-row pearl necklace for a longer necklace with two rows of pearls. She’s been wearing this second set of pearls on and off over the past several months.