T. S. Eliot Prize News

Offord Road Books

 

Martha Sprackland

 

The origin of the list is in 2017, and began with one pamphlet, by Melissa Lee-Houghton, which I and ORB’s co-founder, Patrick Davidson Roberts, were lucky enough to read in manuscript form. We formed ORB in order to publish it, and then to publish other brilliant poetry we thought deserved to be out there. The list is named for the street we lived on during that first formative time.

After three years and ten more publications, and a brief hiatus to catch our breath, over summer this year we opened our reading window; now unfortunately closed again, we are currently reading through more than five hundred new submissions of poetry, essay and fiction, and finding wonderful things in there. In 2022 we’re hoping to publish a novel – watch this space. And we’ll continue to publish the best and boldest in new poetry. In the coming years we’re hoping to collaborate with other publishers, creating innovative crossover works, anthologies and hybrid events. If this year has shown us anything, is that we need to be able to adapt to a changing world. We’re a tiny list, and pride ourselves on being agile, and to dedicating serious editorial rigour to the books we champion. In the near future we hope to bring that focus to work in translation, by poets yet to make an appearance in print in English.

Ella Frears’s debut collection Shine, Darling, which we published in April this year, right in the midst of the first lockdown, is a book we’re phenomenally proud of. It’s intimate, funny, technically adept, and has found admiring readers wherever it’s gone. It has sold more than a thousand copies to date (no mean feat, for a publishing house our size!), been chosen by the PBS as one of their 2020 Recommendations, was one of just five books shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and, of course, now joins the shortlist for the T. S. Eliot Prize. I agree with Mark Waldron, who writes that ‘These poems have a clarity and straightforwardness that only a special kind of attention, and a certain kind of fearlessness, can achieve.’ I hope that Offord Road Books can continue to be inspired by Ella’s fearlessness, and to carry it with us into the books we publish in the years to come.

Carcanet Press

Michael Schmidt

Carcanet is delighted that Sasha Dugdale is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot. A distinctive critic and teacher, a brilliant translator, most of all she’s a poet who takes formal and thematic risks, understands the changing dynamics of the poem sequence, and explores histories through scholarly, open inventiveness.

What about her publisher? The thing I like least about Carcanet is its name. People don’t know how to pronounce it. If it didn’t have that fey ‘t’ at the end, it would be a strong, English-sounding word, car-CANE. The ‘t’ Frenchifies it, if you don’t know your Shakespeare or Herrick, and if you look it up, it turns out to be a jewelled gorget. Yuck.

I didn’t choose the name. Carcanet grew out of the eponymous student magazine I took over in 1967 as an undergraduate. The Press was intended to be a brief, decisive swansong: to publish pamphlets by a few poets whose work Carcanet had encouraged, and then stop. But at the time poetry publishing was hardly thriving. New presses emerged — Fulcrum and Anvil in particular — but old lists were cautious, some were closing. Poets important to us were in peril of losing, or had lost, publishers. There were poets from abroad, Anglophone and other, who ought to have been part of our diet. When Poetry Nation, then PN Review got going, we were caught up in a hopeless enthusiasm which persists.

Carcanet has been backward and forward looking at the same time. We never placed a premium on youth. Age and experience did not count against poets; and we had a weak spot for poet critics. Being British or belonging to a specific school did not matter. We were at odds with the then ‘establishment’. So we grew, and grew.

What is our editorial principle? We wait to be surprised. Submissions which make you read aloud are off to a good start. If they surprise by rightness, and by a relation to larger traditions, modernist or otherwise, they engage us. I want the list to be full of surprises for the reader, marked by formal and linguistic intelligence, and by invention which is not the same thing as novelty. Particularism would be our philosophy, if we had one. It entails a resistance to theories and ‘schools’. To say more would risk a limiting definition… A register of ‘milestones’ would omit books which mean a lot to us, even if they’ve not found wide readership.

Each reader can find a trail through the forests we have planted. For the new reader, an excellent place to start is with Sasha’s Deformations.

 

Michael Schmidt is the Managing Director and Publisher of Carcanet, which has just celebrated its 50th anniversary. https://www.carcanet.co.uk/index.shtml

T. S. Eliot Prize 2020 – Shortlist Announced

T. S. Eliot Prize 2020

2020 T. S. ELIOT PRIZE SHORTLIST COMPRISES TEN ‘UNSETTLING, CAPTIVATING AND COMPELLING’ COLLECTIONS

Judges Lavinia Greenlaw (Chair), Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan have chosen the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist from 153 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers.

The shortlist comprises work from five men and five women; two Americans; as well as poets of Native American, Chinese Indonesian and British, Indian and mixed race ancestry. Nine publishers are represented, more than for many years, with five titles from new or recently-established presses. There are three debut collections.

Natalie Diaz – Postcolonial Love Poem (Faber & Faber)

Sasha Dugdale – Deformations (Carcanet Press)

Ella Frears – Shine, Darling (Offord Road Books)

Will Harris – RENDANG (Granta Poetry)

Wayne Holloway Smith – Love Minus Love (Bloodaxe Books)

Bhanu Kapil – How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry)

Daisy Lafarge – Life Without Air (Granta Poetry)

Glyn Maxwell – How the hell are you (Picador Poetry)

Shane McCrae – Sometimes I Never Suffered (Corsair Poetry)

J O Morgan – The Martian’s Regress (Cape Poetry)

 

 

For more information on the shortlisted poets, see our shortlist page

Lavinia Greenlaw said:

‘My fellow judges, Mona Arshi, Andrew McMillan and I have been reading books written in a different world, the one before Covid-19. The urgency and vitality of the ten books on this shortlist commanded our attention nonetheless. We were unsettled, captivated and compelled. Poetry is the most resilient, potent, capacious and universal art we have.’

An announcement will follow about the The T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings and The T S Eliot Prize Award Ceremony.

The T. S. Eliot Prize is run by The T. S. Eliot Foundation. The T. S. Eliot Prize is 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. It is the only major poetry prize which is judged purely by established poets. The 2020 judging panel are looking for the best new poetry collection written in English and published in 2020.

The weekly T. S. Eliot Prize newsletter will provide essential background on the shortlisted poets, including links to specially-commissioned new videos, readers’ notes and reviews. Click here to subscribe.

Last year’s winner was Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise and the judges were John Burnside (chair), Sarah Howe and Nick Makoha.