Peter Gizzi at the T. S. Eliot Prize Readings, Royal Festival Hall, London, 12 January 2025. Photo © Pete Woodhead

The T. S. Eliot Foundation is delighted to announce the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 is Peter Gizzi for Fierce Elegy, published by Penguin Poetry.

We are delighted to welcome and honour a work that is infinitely sad yet resolute, and so fully alive in body and spirit. Written in the afterlife of grief, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy brings us poems that revel in minutiae but also brave the large questions in a lyric sequence of transcendental beauty.

Peter Gizzi was born in Alma, Michigan. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including: Now It’s Dark (2020); Archeophonics (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award; Threshold Songs (2011); In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 (2014); and Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet Press 2020). In 2018 his work was the subject of In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan).

Gizzi’s honours include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships in poetry from the Howard Foundation, the Rex Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has been a Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge  University twice, and has taught at Brown University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Program at Naropa, and elsewhere. He lives in Holyoake, Massachusetts.

You can view videos of Peter reading from Fierce Elegy and hear him talking about his work on the T. S. Eliot Prize website and YouTube channel.

The UK’s largest annual poetry event is just days away. Book your tickets now for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 Shortlist Readings on Sunday 12 January 2025 at 7pm.

Priya Abularach, Ahana Banerji, Tallulah Howarth, Elliot Ruff and Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha have produced dazzling video reviews of Eliot Prize shortlisted titles.

The T.S. Eliot Prize and The Poetry Society are excited to share the rest of the video reviews created as part of the Young Critics Scheme. ‘Their inventiveness and attention to poetic detail is always such a delight’, writes Cia Mangat of The Poetry Society, on the Children’s Poetry Summit blog: ‘In this year’s video reviews, you can see how they have drawn on a number of visual styles, including stop-motion animation, nature documentary, and watercolour painting, in their responses.’

In the latest additions Ahana Banerji discusses the skilful patterning and mirroring in Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows to the North, while Elliot Ruff uncovers the intertextual references of Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam. Priya Abularach elucidates the formal inventiveness in Karen McCarthy Woolf’s verse novel Top Doll, and Tallulah Howarth pulls at the many threads of Rachel Mann’s ‘tapestry of alternative visions’, Eleanor Among the Saints. Finally, Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha finds an invitation to consider non-human perspectives in Katrina Porteous’s Rhizodont. These complete the set with the five video reviews published last week.

The Young Critics Scheme is a partnership project between the T. S. Eliot Prize and The Poetry Society that aims to develop the skills of emerging critics and to amplify the voices of young people in poetry. We invite ten writers aged between 18 and 25 to take part in criticism workshops and training and create short video reviews of each of the collections shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Now in its third year, the Scheme is going from strength to strength. Last year’s reviews were viewed almost 35,000 views in total and many of the Young Critics alumni have gone on to publish reviews in leading magazines. Applications for the scheme doubled this year and we’re delighted with the immediate response to the new cohort’s work. Discover more about the Young Critics Scheme here.