There was a brilliant response to the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 Shortlist Readings, held at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on 12 January 2025. Each of the ten shortlisted poets, including Karen McCarthy Woolf (shown above) gave extraordinary readings at what is the largest annual poetry event in the UK, expertly compered by Ian McMillan.
If you weren’t able to attend or you’d like to experience the evening all over again, you can listen to recordings of the event in a variety of ways.
Visit BBC Sounds to hear the episode of The Verb dedicated to the 2024 Readings. First broadcast on 19 January 2025, it offers a wonderfully atmospheric edit of the evening, presented by Ian McMillan.
To hear the Readings in their entirety, introduced with a reading from Eliot’s poem sequence ‘Landscapes’ by 2023 Prize-winner and 2024 judge Anthony Joseph, visit T. S. Eliot Prize YouTube channel.
You can also listen to edited recordings of individual poets reading: Peter Gizzi, winner of the 2024 Prize, and shortlisted poets Raymond Antrobus, Hannah Copley, Helen Farish, Gustav Parker Hibbett, Rachel Mann, Carl Phillips, Katrina Porteous and Karen McCarthy Woolf.
There is also a recording of the moving readings given on behalf of Gboyega Odubanjo by his friends and fellow-poets Gabriel Akamo and Joe Carrick-Varty. Odubanjo, who died in August 2023, can himself be heard in two recordings of him reading from his shortlisted collection Adam.
You can also delve into the history of T. S. Eliot Prize on our YouTube channel, which offers recordings of the Readings dating back to 2016.
