With the programme just announced for 2025’s The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, we invite you to join us for a very special T. S. Eliot Prize event: a rare appearance in the UK by the American poet Peter Gizzi, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 for Fierce Elegy.
Peter Gizzi will be reading his poems and will also be joined in a conversation about his writing life by broadcaster and fellow writer Ian McMillan.
The hour-long event will take place in the Queens Hotel, The Promenade, Cheltenham, on Friday 17 October, 4pm onwards. Tickets (£13) go on general sale from 4 September from the Festival box office (advance bookings are offered to members until 3 September).
Michigan-born Gizzi is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Fierce Elegy (Penguin Poetry, 2024), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. It was described by judges Mimi Khalvati (Chair), Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan, as ‘a work that is infinitely sad yet resolute, and so fully alive in body and spirit. [It] brings us poems that revel in minutiae but also brave the large questions in a lyric sequence of transcendental beauty.’ Gizzi’s many honours include fellowships in poetry from the Howard Foundation, the Rex Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has been a Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University twice, and has taught widely across the US.
Writer and broadcaster Ian McMillan presents The Verb on BBC Radio 4 every week and its sister programme The Adverb. He hosts both the annual T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings and the Academy of Urbanism Awards. His latest books include My Sand Life, My Pebble Life (Bloomsbury), a memoir of a childhood and the sea, and To Fold The Evening Star – New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press). He is poet in residence for Barnsley FC and was Barnsley’s Lockdown Poet.
The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival runs from 10 to 19 October 2025. Poets Simon Armitage, Raymond Antrobus, Billy Collins and Hannah Silva will also be appearing. For full details and to book tickets for the T. S. Eliot Prize event with Peter Gizzi and Ian McMillan, visit the event webpage, telephone 01242 850270, or email boxoffice@cheltenhamfestivals.org
