We had 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.

Shortlisted poet Karen McCarthy Woolf at the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 Shortlist Readings, Royal Festival Hall, London, on 12 January 2025. Photo © Pete Woodhead for the Southbank Centre, London

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.

Michael Longley with Valerie Eliot, on winning the T. S. Eliot Prize 2000.

The T. S. Eliot Prize is deeply saddened to report the death of Michael Longley on 22 January 2025 at the age of 85.

Michael Longley won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2000 for The Weather in Japan, about which Paul Muldoon, the Chair of judges, said: ‘These are poems which at first glance may seem small-scale but which always expand our sense of history, be it of ancient Greece, World II Germany or Northern Ireland. Longley is a skilled lyric poet of compassion and grace.’

Michael Longley was also shortlisted in 1995 for The Ghost Orchid, in 2004 for Snow Water and in 2014 for The Stairwell. Robin Robertson, his long-standing editor at Jonathan Cape, said: ‘It was an honour to work with him on his books from Gorse Fires in 1991 until his new selected poems, Ash Keys, published last year to mark his eighty-fifth birthday. Not that I had to work very hard, as every poem was close to perfect. I remember remarking in Belfast – at the launch of Love Poet, Carpenter – a festschrift marking his seventieth – that generally the only editorial input that Michael’s books ever required from me was an ISBN number.’

Longley chaired the T. S. Eliot Prize judging panel, alongside Deryn Rees-Jones and Fred D’Aguiar, in 2002. He also judged the Prize with Carol Ann Duffy (Chair) and David Morley in 2012.

Amongst many prizes and awards he won the Whitbread Prize for Gorse Fires and the Hawthornden Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize for The Weather in Japan. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and received the Librex Montale Prize, the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, the Yakamochi Medal, the International Roma Prize and in 2015 the Griffin Poetry Prize, in which year he was also honoured with the Freedom of the City of Belfast. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010, in which year he was made a CBE. In 2022, he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime’s achievement.

Sean O’Brien noted how Longley’s poetry evolved from ‘classically educated formalism towards conversational intimacies … His work indicates one of the gifts of the major poet, of making the one life speak for all.’ The Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney regarded Michael as ‘A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders.’ Longley’s own view of the poet’s task was ‘to find fresh rhythms … the only way one is going to find new vital rhythms is being vital and alive and alert and responsive oneself. To live life with all of one’s pores open.’

Michael Longley was married to the critic and academic Edna Longley, who judged the inaugural T. S. Eliot Prize in 1993. Our deepest sympathies to his family.