Michael Schmidt

Carcanet is proud to have the only first collection on this year’s T.S. Eliot prize shortlist. Victoria Kennefick featured in our New Poetries introductory series in January and her book came out three months later. It had a tremendous reception despite lockdown, with reviews and on-line events. She is a strong performer. She refuses to behave herself in the themes she chooses to explore, and she is formally as ambitious as she is experimental. She is also a committed reader of other people’s poetry, and her roots and rhythms reach back in time, not just decades but centuries.

Victoria is the kind of poet my associate publisher John McAuliffe and I are always thrilled to discover. She is not part of a mainstream, and though she has studied creative writing, she has got well beyond the karaoke phase that some would-be poets never get beyond, as they mix and match but never quite make something of their own. We are delighted the judges have singled her out – surprisingly, she is also the only Irish poet on this year’s list.

For Carcanet, this has been a remarkable year for first collections, with books by Jason Allen-Paisant, Parwana Fayyaz and Isobel Williams, as well as Victoria. What is exciting is how different each book is from the others, the integrity and ambition of each poet’s approach, and their thematic and geographical range. Next year looks like providing another harvest of fine first books, by Padraig Regan, Stav Poleg, Colm Toibin, Celia Sorhaindo, J.G. Ying and Joseph Minden. We are also bringing a number of poets from around the Anglophone world into circulation in the UK for the first time.

Over its now 51 years Carcanet has had many poets listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize and two of them – Sinead Morrissey and Les Murray – have won the laurels. At a time when review culture has rather run out of steam and space, and so many of the journals that used to feature poetry and poetry reviews have folded, awards are often spotlights – their shortlists which attract readers to debate with one another are a godsend to publishers. And the winning poet is news, over and above the important thing, which is the poetry itself. Perhaps the shortlist poets most want to be on is the TSE. Its spotlights shine brighter each year. Long may it thrive.

Parisa Ebrahimi

Chatto & Windus has a long and illustrious history of publishing poetry. Founded in 1855, it is one of the UK’s oldest literary imprints, and the oldest continuous imprint at Penguin Random House. Poetry has formed the backbone of our list from its very beginnings. Our backlist includes Elizabeth Bishop, Wilfred Owen and C.P Cavafy, and was historically presided over by some of the great poets of the last century – including our country’s poet laureates. Today, we are an imprint run entirely by women, and the Chatto poetry list is now synonymous with some of the most exciting, diverse and ground-breaking young poets at work today. Since 2009 our poets have changed the cultural conversation around poetry: around what it looks like, what it sounds like, who is writing it, and how it is has come to be perceived in the British Isles today.

The books we welcome on to our list are united by their literary merit, linguistic richness, cultural diversity and (perhaps most importantly) a depth of feeling. What’s most important to us is that our poets feel like a family – their books are so often in dialogue with one another, as well as the world around us.

Our list has encompassed many ‘firsts’ in the poetry world. In 2015, our poet Sarah Howe won the T. S. Eliot Prize, the UK’s most prestigious poetry prize. Her book, LOOP OF JADE, was the first debut – and Sarah the first woman of colour – to have won the prize in its history. In many ways, this paved the way for a shift in British poetry towards a more inclusive poetics that we see today

Since then, our poets have won every single major poetry prize in the UK. In 2018, our poets won four major awards across the poetry prize spectrum: the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Liz Berry), the Forward Prize for Best Collection (Danez Smith, again with another first: the youngest-ever winner of the prize), the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry (Jay Bernard), and the Dylan Thomas Prize (Kayo Chingonyi).

Kayo Chingonyi comes to poetry with an extraordinary range of influences, and has understood from the start the power his poems have not only to impress the reader but to move them as well. His poems embody that depth of feeling which is so integral to the Chatto poetry list. No more so than in his latest collection, which grew out of a very personal place for Kayo. These are poems of risk and solace. Now a poetry editor himself, and about to launch his own list at Bloomsbury, I’ve no doubt he will shape the poetic landscape for the next generation and decades to come.