L to r: Eve Esfandiari-Denney (photo: Lara Laeverenz); Jason Allen-Pasaint (photo: Adrian Pope for the T. S. Eliot Prize)

With the programme just announced for 2024’s The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, we invite you to join us for this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize reading.

Jason Allen-Paisant, who won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2023, will be joined by guest reader Eve Esfandiari-Denney. Both poets are celebrated performers and this will be a reading to relish. The event will take place in the Town Hall Pillar Room on Friday 11 October, from 3.30pm. Tickets (£12) are available from the Festival box office.

Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet Press) is a book ‘with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair’ said T. S. Eliot judges Paul Muldoon, Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul. The collection was also a Poetry Book Society Choice, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and was shortlisted for the Writers’ Prize and the Jhalak Prize.

Jason will be joined on stage by Eve Esfandiari-Denney. Eve has been shortlisted for the 2024 Forward Prize’s Jerwood Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed with ‘Nearly White Girl Girling on Behalf of Proximity to Mammal’. Her debut pamphlet My Bodies This Morning This Evening (Bad Betty Press, 2022) ‘gleams in its ability to balance vulnerability with awe’ (PN Review).

The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, 4 – 13 October 2024, celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. Joelle Taylor, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022, is among the guest curators. Many other outstanding poets will also be appearing, including Simon Armitage, Wendy Cope, Holly McNish, Salena Godden and Seán Hewitt. For full details and to book tickets for the Eliot Prize Reading with Jason Allen-Paisant and Eve Esfandiari-Denney, visit the event webpage, telephone 01242 850270, or email boxoffice@cheltenhamfestivals.org.

‘Such an amazing experience’ – Cal O’Reilly (left) and Leo Kang Beevers (right), 2023 Young Critics, encourage you to apply in 2024.

The T. S. Eliot Prize and The Poetry Society are delighted to invite applications for the third year of the highly praised and hugely successful Young Critics Scheme.

The programme offers a unique development opportunity to ten budding reviewers aged 18 to 25 in the UK and Ireland. Young Critics receive expert, in-depth mentorship to create video reviews of the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist.

In the first two years of the scheme Young Critics’ video reviews have been watched over 60,000 times and shared online by readers, publishers, poets and critics. Several Young Critics have since been invited to review for leading magazines including The Poetry Review, Poetry London and Magma. Look out for forthcoming videos explaining the benefits of taking part from 2023 Young Critics Leo Kang Beevers and Cal O’Reilly.

The selected participants will attend four online workshops on reviewing poetry, editing and video-making, including sessions led by critics Helen Bowell and Isabelle Baafi. Each will be assigned a book from the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 Shortlist in early October and submit a video review by 20 November 2024.

Young Critics receive copies of all the shortlisted collections and two free tickets to the celebrated T. S. Eliot Prize Readings at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, London, on 12 January 2025 (or free access to the livestream if they are unable to attend in person). They will have the chance to meet each other over dinner and will continue to receive support beyond the programme from The Poetry Society and T. S. Eliot Prize to further develop their reviewing careers.

No previous reviewing or poetry writing experience is required. Applications from writers underrepresented in poetry reviewing are encouraged, including those from Black, Asian and other ethnic minority backgrounds; d/Deaf and disabled writers; working class writers; and LGBTQ+ writers.

Find full details about the programme and submit your application here.

John Burnside. Photo © Helmut Fricke

We are very sad to report the death of John Burnside on 29 May, aged 69, following a short illness. John won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for Black Cat Bone, a collection the judges described as ‘a haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness’. He was also shortlisted for four other collections: All One Breath in 2014; The Light Trap in 2002; The Asylum Dance in 2000; and The Myth of the Twin in 1994. John was a distinguished Chair of  judges for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2019, having previously judged the competition in 2001.

Robin Robertson, John’s long-standing editor and Poetry Publisher of Jonathan Cape, said: ‘It was one of the privileges of my life to work with John Burnside. Flawed but fearless, fabulously gifted, he was a truly great writer.’

John contributed to the series of articles we commissioned to mark the 30^th anniversary of the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2023. He expressed his delight in being a judge in the year that the first woman winner was chosen – Anne Carson in 2001 – and the surprise and profound pleasure he felt about his own win in 2011.

An internationally celebrated poet, novelist, memoirist, writer of short stories and academic works, John Burnside received many major awards. In 2023 he won the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature. His most recent collection, Ruin, Blossom (Cape Poetry), was published in April this year.