When Joelle Taylor’s collection, C+nto and Othered Poems, won the T. S. Eliot Prize, Chair of judges Glyn Maxwell hailed it as ‘a blazing book of rage and light, a grand opera of liberation from the shadows of indifference and oppression’.

We asked Joelle to reflect on her experience as an Eliot Prize winner. She wrote:

Winning the T. S. Eliot Prize has been a transformative experience. It is hard to describe what it is like to inhabit a stage for most of your life but still not be seen. I was used to the invisibility, wore it like a flag at times. When C+nto won it was as though a spotlight were suddenly switched on in the theatre and I was fully lit from every angle. It meant that my words were visible, and that visibility has led to my first novel The Night Alphabet being published, among many other wonderful moments. My first tour after winning sold out, and I achieved my ambition of playing Sydney Opera House. But the real gift is that for the first time I feel as though I can write, that I have a right to write. I’m indebted to the judges and the Prize, and am running hard at every opportunity it offers me.

Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet, playwright and author who has published four collections of poetry. She has published three plays and her novel, The Night Alphabet, will be published by river run in 2024. Joelle founded SLAMbassadors, the UK’s national youth slam championships, for The Poetry Society in 2001 and was its Artistic Director and National Coach until 2018. She is the host of London’s premier night of poetry and music, Out-Spoken, currently resident at the Southbank Centre. As an educator she has led workshops and residencies in schools, prisons, youth centres, refugee groups, and other settings. (Joelle Taylor photo © Adrian Pope.)

About the T. S. Eliot Prize

The T. S. Eliot Prize celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2023. Awarded annually to the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland, the Prize was founded by the Poetry Book Society in 1993 to celebrate the PBS’s 40th birthday and to honour its founding poet. The T. S. Eliot Estate has provided the prize money since the Prize’s inception in 1993, and the T. S. Eliot Foundation took over the running of the Prize following the acquisition of the PBS by InPress Books in 2016. For more on the history of the Prize, visit tseliot.com/prize