T. S. Eliot Prize News

JEAN SPRACKLAND TO CHAIR 2022 T. S. ELIOT PRIZE JUDGING PANEL

JEAN SPRACKLAND TO CHAIR 2022 T. S. ELIOT PRIZE JUDGING PANEL

 

The T. S. Eliot Foundation is delighted to announce the judges for the 2022 Prize. The panel will be chaired by Jean Sprackland, alongside Hannah Lowe and Roger Robinson

The 2022 judging panel will be looking for the best new poetry collection written in English and published in 2022. The prize is unique in that entrants are judged by their peers; the panel always consists of established poets.

Jean Sprackland said:

The T. S. Eliot Prize is a vibrant and vital part of our poetry culture, and it’s an honour to act as chair of judges this year. Of all the pleasures involved, there are two I’m particularly excited about. First, the time spent reading, and the view that will offer of the poetry being written now, in all its breadth and variety. And second, the joy of sitting down with Hannah and Roger – two poets I greatly admire – and sharing our discoveries together.

The call for submissions will go out in June, with the submission window closing at the end of July.

Following the retirement of Chris Holifield at the end of June, the T. S. Eliot Foundation is also pleased to announce that Mike Sims has been appointed as Director of the T. S. Eliot Prize as from 1 June.

Mike Sims said: “I’m delighted to be taking on the role of managing such a celebrated and successful award as the T. S. Eliot Prize. It has had an unerring knack of bringing the very best poetry collections to the fore since it was founded in 1993 by the Poetry Book Society, and now under the careful guardianship of the T. S. Eliot Foundation. It has been in excellent hands throughout the decades, thanks to Chris Holifield. I look forward to following her example in the years ahead.”

Chris Holifield said: “It has been a been a privilege and a pleasure to run the T. S. Eliot Prize for twenty years, fourteen of them for the Poetry Book Society and six under the aegis of the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and to play a part in its growth in influence and prestige.”

 The 2022 T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings will take place on Sunday 15 January 2023 at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall (tickets on sale later this year). The shortlist readings are the largest annual poetry event in the UK.

The winner of the 2022 Prize will be announced at the Award Ceremony on Monday 16 January 2023. The T. S. Eliot Prize continues to be the most valuable prize in British poetry – the winning poet will receive a cheque for £25,000 and the shortlisted poets will be presented with cheques for £1,500.

Last year’s winner was Joelle Taylor’s C+nto and Othered Poems and the judges were Glyn Maxwell (chair), Caroline Bird and Zaffar Kunial.

For more information on this year’s judges visit the T. S. Eliot Prize website at http://tseliot.com/prize/the-t-s-eliot-prize-2022/judges/.

Joelle Taylor’s C+nto & Othered Poems wins 2021 T. S. Eliot Prize

The T. S. Eliot Foundation is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2021 T. S. Eliot Prize is Joelle Taylor for C+nto & Othered Poems, published by The Westbourne Press.

Chair Glyn Maxwell said:

Every book on the shortlist had a strong claim on the award. We found it extremely hard to choose between ten superb collections. The arguments towards the end were passionate and thoughtful, but the choice of the judging panel is Joelle Taylor’s C+nto and Othered Poems, a blazing book of rage and light, a grand opera of liberation from the shadows of indifference and oppression.

After months of further reading, Judges Glyn Maxwell (Chair), Caroline Bird and Zafffar Kunial chose the winner from a shortlist which consisted of an eclectic mixture of established poets, none of whom has previously won the Prize, and relative newcomers. The list comprises one debut collection; work from six men and four women; one American; one poet from Ireland; as well as poets of Zambian and mixed-race ancestry, including Jamaican-British and Jamaican-Chinese.

Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet, playwright and author who has published four collections of poetry: Ska Tissue (Mother Foucault Press, 2011), The Woman Who Was Not There (Burning Eye Books, 2014) and Songs My Enemy Taught Me (Out-Spoken Press, 2017). She 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. She has published three plays and a collection of short stories, The Night Alphabet, will be published in 2021. As an educator she has lead workshops and residencies in schools, prisons, youth centres, refugee groups, and other settings.  C+nto & Othered Poems was published in 2021 by The Westbourne Press. http://joelletaylor.co.uk/index.html

Glyn Maxwell announced that Joelle Taylor was the winner of the 2021 T. S. Eliot Prize at the award ceremony at the Wallace Collection in London on Monday 10th January. On 9th January nine of the poets read to a hybrid international audience in a fantastic evening of poetry. The broadcast version will be available for seven days on demand from the Southbank Centre  https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/literature-poetry/ts-eliot-prize?eventId=863500

Joelle will receive the prize money of £25,000 and each shortlisted poet will receive £1,500 in recognition of their achievement in winning a place on the most prestigious shortlist in UK poetry.

The T. S. Eliot Prize is run by The T. S. Eliot Foundation. It is the most valuable prize in British poetry. It is the only poetry prize which is judged purely by established poets. The 2021 judging panel was looking for the best new poetry collection written in English and published in 2021.

This year’s Prize also continues the collaboration between the T. S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Archive. The T. S. Eliot Prize Winners’ Archive presents a celebration of the Prize and going forward each winner will be inducted into the Archive, so that their voice will be preserved and made available for posterity online.

The T. S. Eliot Prize YouTube site with hundreds of videos by shortlisted poets is at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiFYerr-EK6Xkys5kh6tZ1Q/videos

The weekly T. S. Eliot Prize newsletter has provided essential background on the shortlisted poets, including links to specially-commissioned new videos, readers’ notes and reviews. To look at past newsletters or subscribe go to:

tseliot.com/prize/subscribe-to-the-t-s-eliot-prize-newsletter/.

Last year’s winner was Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart and the judges were Lavinia Greenlaw (chair), Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan.

The Faber & Faber Poetry List

Jane Feaver, Editorial Manager, Poetry

To mark the centenary of the publication of The Waste Land, Faber will be publishing, among other things, a full colour edition of the manuscript – a reminder that, for almost as long, poetry has been the beating heart of this publishing house. The poetry list continues to feed and flourish on that legacy, while pushing out new shoots, discovering unbroken ground and unheard voices.

A recent reading by five Faber poets shows the model in action: Paul Muldoon, who was first published by the company fifty years ago, launched his new collection, Howdie-Skelp, alongside Maurice Riordan and his latest, Shoulder Tap (Maurice, who has a thirty-year history with the firm); joining them were representatives of a younger generation: Jack Underwood with his second collection, A Year in the New Life, which we’re delighted to find nominated for this year’s T.S. Eliot prize, and Emily Berry, whose forthcoming third collection, Unexhausted Time (a PBS Choice) we are publishing in the spring.

In the same line-up, an entirely new voice to the list – Victoria Adukwei Bulley – read from her remarkable debut, Quiet, out next summer, poems that explore questions of interiority and selfhood, and the telling distance between white and black noise.

The list is international in its reach. We are proud in the last few years to have brought into the fold Ilya Kaminsky, Ishion Hutchinson, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner Natalie Diaz, whose remarkable debut collection, When My Brother Was An Aztec, appears under the Faber imprint next year.

Writers in translation are revitalized, whether from as far back as Gillian Clarke’s lucid rendering of The Gododdin and Simon Armitage’s electric version of The Owl and the Nightingale, or in Michael Hofmann’s wonderfully sympathetic translation of the twentieth-century German poet, Gottfried Benn. In this vein, we are delighted to be publishing the collected translations of Seamus Heaney (the first of four Heaney titles projected over the next few years), poems extraordinary in their range and intellectual curiosity, and an example to us all.