With the programme just announced for 2024’s The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, we invite you to join us for this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize reading.

Jason Allen-Paisant, who won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2023, will be joined by guest reader Eve Esfandiari-Denney. Both poets are celebrated performers and this will be a reading to relish. The event will take place in the Town Hall Pillar Room on Friday 11 October, from 3.30pm. Tickets (£12) are available from the Festival box office.

Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet Press) is a book ‘with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair’ said T. S. Eliot judges Paul Muldoon, Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul. The collection was also a Poetry Book Society Choice, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and was shortlisted for the Writers’ Prize and the Jhalak Prize.

Jason will be joined on stage by Eve Esfandiari-Denney. Eve has been shortlisted for the 2024 Forward Prize’s Jerwood Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed with ‘Nearly White Girl Girling on Behalf of Proximity to Mammal’. Her debut pamphlet My Bodies This Morning This Evening (Bad Betty Press, 2022) ‘gleams in its ability to balance vulnerability with awe’ (PN Review).

The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, 4 – 13 October 2024, celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. Joelle Taylor, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022, is among the guest curators. Many other outstanding poets will also be appearing, including Simon Armitage, Wendy Cope, Holly McNish, Salena Godden and Seán Hewitt. For full details and to book tickets for the Eliot Prize Reading with Jason Allen-Paisant and Eve Esfandiari-Denney, visit the event webpage, telephone 01242 850270, or email boxoffice@cheltenhamfestivals.org.