Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith was an English poet and novelist. Stevie Smith was born on 20 September 1902 in Hull in England. She was the second daughter of Ethel and Charles Smith. She was christened Florence Margaret, but always called Peggy by the family. She acquired the name Stevie as a young woman when she was riding in the park with a friend who said that she reminded him of the jockey, Steve Donaghue. She has awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1969. 

Her first work was the fiction Novel on Yellow Paper was published in 1936 and drew heavily on her own life experience, examining the unrest in England during World War I. He Collected Poems of Stevie Smith (1975), illustrated with her Thurber-like sketches, includes her first book of poems, A Good Time Was Had by All (1937) and Not Waving but Drowning (1957), the title poem of which appears in many anthologies. Smith died of a brain tumor on March 7, 1971.