2024
T. S. Eliot Prize

Winner

Peter Gizzi was born in Alma, Michigan. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including: Now It’s Dark (2020); Archeophonics (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award; Threshold Songs (2011); In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 (2014); and Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet Press 2020). In 2018, his work was the subject of In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan). Gizzi’s honours include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and 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 at Brown University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Program at Naropa, and elsewhere. He lives in Holyoake, Massachusetts. Author photo © Carol Lollis
Penguin Poetry

The Chair of the judges’ speech

Announcements

The Chair of the Judges’ speech

‘It has been a privilege and pleasure to read nearly 200 books and we’re happy to have ended up with such a rich and balanced shortlist. The ten collections we have chosen show tremendous variety in theme and style and between them represent some of the diverse strands that distinguish contemporary poetry published in the UK. We’re extremely proud of the shortlist we have agreed on and would like to congratulate all ten poets on their outstanding collections.’ – Mimi Khalvati, Chair

The Chair of the Judges’ speech

‘It has been a privilege and pleasure to read nearly 200 books and we’re happy to have ended up with such a rich and balanced shortlist. The ten collections we have chosen show tremendous variety in theme and style and between them represent some of the diverse strands that distinguish contemporary poetry published in the UK. We’re extremely proud of the shortlist we have agreed on and would like to congratulate all ten poets on their outstanding collections.’ – Mimi Khalvati, Chair

Shortlisted Works

Shortlisted Poets

Peter Gizzi was born in Alma, Michigan. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including: Now...
Raymond Antrobus was born in Hackney, London, to an English mother and Jamaican father. His collections include two...
Hannah Copley is a British writer and academic who works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at...
Helen Farish is the author of Intimates (Cape Poetry, 2005); Nocturnes at Nohant: The Decade of Chopin and...
Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout, born in the USA and currently residing...
Rachel Mann is a priest, writer and broadcaster. She is the author of thirteen books, including her debut...
Gboyega Odubanjo (1996–2023) was born and raised in East London. He was the author of three poetry pamphlets:...
Carl Phillips is the author of sixteen books of poetry, including Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007–2020...
Katrina Porteous was born in Aberdeen and has lived on the Northumberland coast since 1987. Many of the...
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL is the author of three poetry...

Judges

CHAIR

Mimi Khalvati, awarded the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2023, has published nine collections with Carcanet Press, including: The...
Anthony Joseph was born in Trinidad. He is a poet, novelist, academic and musician. He holds a PhD...
Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection Three Poems (Faber & Faber, 2018) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the John Pollard...

Videos

Peter Gizzi reads from Fierce Elegy at the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings
Rachel Mann reads from Eleanor Among the Saints at the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings
Gustav Parker Hibbett reads from High Jump as Icarus Story at the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings
Raymond Antrobus reads from Signs, Music at the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings
Katrina Porteous reads from Rhizodont at the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings
Carl Phillips reads from ‘Scattered Snows, to the North’ at the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings
Karen McCarthy Woolf reads from Top Doll at the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings
Hannah Copley reads from Lapwing at the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings
Helen Farish reads from The Penny Dropping at the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings
The T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 Shortlist Readings

Related News Stories

There was 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...
The T. S. Eliot Foundation is delighted to announce the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 is Peter Gizzi for Fierce Elegy, published by Penguin Poetry. Chair Mimi Khalvati said: We are delighted to welcome and honour a work that is infinitely sad yet resolute, and so fully...
We are thrilled to announce the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 Shortlist, chosen by judges Mimi Khalvati (Chair), Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan from 187 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers. The eclectic list comprises seasoned poets, two debuts, two second collections, and two previously shortlisted poets from...
The T. S. Eliot Foundation is delighted to announce the judges for the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry. Mimi Khalvati will chair, and will be joined on the panel by Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan.   The Prize is awarded annually to the author of the best new...
Mimi Khalvati, Chair of judges, T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. Photo © Justin Owen

T. S. Eliot Prize 2024: the Chair of judges’ speech, by Mimi Khalvati

It has been a privilege and pleasure to read nearly 200 books and we’re happy to have ended up with such a rich and balanced shortlist. The ten collections we have chosen show tremendous variety in theme and style and between them represent some of the diverse strands that distinguish contemporary poetry published in the UK. We’re extremely proud of the shortlist we have agreed on and would like to congratulate all ten poets on their outstanding collections.

In his third collection, Signs, Music, Raymond Antrobus writes with tenderness and self-scrutinizing wit about ‘breaking up with childlessness’ and becoming a father. His long sequences may be candidly autobiographical but they are never self-preoccupied; instead, in learning to watch the toddler pointing at each magpie in the park, the poet’s eye becomes reverentially attentive to ordinary things and the quotidian lives of his London neighbours: ‘the earth is not here for us / but with us.’ In the final pages, as his son points at the soft body of a caterpillar and ‘signs, music’, existential anxiety cedes to a celebration of meaning-making in all its forms.

Urgent, written on the move, Hannah Copley’s Lapwing, flitting between bird and human, father and daughter, is a kaleidoscopic flight of the mind through grief, alcohol addiction, familial love and obsession. In a consonantal music, alliterative and phrasal, Copley’s dream songs riff with joy and abandon on lapwing’s guises in a stream of sightings, real and imagined. These poems are invocations, magical but entirely plausible, forever looking skyward in a quest ‘that can never be done’, and that leave us, like ‘Lapwing, heart sore’.

Helen Farish’s The Penny Dropping is an unflinching and gripping account of the arc and aftermath of a failed relationship. Taking its epigraph from The Waste Land, ‘Shall I at least set my lands in order?’, it is also a virtuosic interrogation of the relationship between lyric and narrative time. Rather than shaping 52 short poems into one long elegiac sequence, Farish keeps alive the immediacy of the vanished present by meticulous relocation of ‘you’ and ‘I’ in space and time. Beginning in Morocco in the 1980s (‘the air in Essaouira / glassine on the first day of spring; harira’) and ending with the relationship’s enduring prompts in the present (Pasta alla Gorgonzola; / every wedding I’ve ever been to…’), The Penny Dropping is the best love poem anyone has written in years.

Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy is a breathtaking book-length sequence in which each line or sentence, often paratactic, non-hierarchical, could be a poem in its own right. As if wordings had been gifted to him out of the aether, one-liners, two-liners coalesce into love lyrics, or a thought enters his head which, step by step, he unravels until a nucleus is reached and pierced. Sometimes eschewing syntax for song, sometimes fractured by loss into a language that sobs and stutters, each poem could also be an ars poetica, freeing a voice that is light and landscape, ‘to come as sunrise / and remember the mother. // And the father everywhere / inside migrating birds.’

With High Jump as Icarus StoryGustav Parker Hibbett has produced an audacious and remarkably cogent debut which maps the muscular grace of the high jumper’s trajectory with verse which shimmers with equal ambitions of flight. Its success lies partly in the way the poet resolves the leap, how they negotiate the confluence of form and content, even as they wrestle with trauma. Tender and fierce, and at times intensely personal, these poems bravely negotiate the interstices of the spiritual, the physical and the familial.

‘Behold!’ Rachel Mann exhorts us and we do, we behold in awe and wonder as she imagines, embroiders, mythologises the many selves of Eleanor ‘John’ Rykener, a trans medieval seamstress, sex worker, wife, widow, in this collection of extraordinary intensity, Eleanor Among the Saints. ‘Text is textile texture textus’ Mann tells us and her language is indeed gorgeous, liturgical, ‘whipped, corded’, but always in the service of her vision – be it of faith, love or resurrection – and ‘best, the best of it: there are no false trails.’

In Adam, Gboyega Odubanjo writes from the centre rather than the margins. This is a startling debut which deals, as the best poems do – in universals. These striking poems move seamlessly from the colloquial to the political, while confronting the most tragic aspects of contemporary Britain with wit, humour and doses of hope. Adam is the work of a restless, trickster poet with an assured awareness of tradition and community. With their ambitious and innovative use of form and language, the poems here both shock and seduce with their righteous humanity.

It should be no surprise to hear Carl Phillips’s work described as transcendent. As one of our finest lyric poets, this is what Phillips does. In Scattered Snows, to the North, there is a deceptive lightness of line. While their tonalities seldom deviate from their measured pitch, these are poems which apply pressure, which weigh on us with intimate force. This is a poet haunted by the precision of the line. With their clarity of perception and their considerations of memory and forgetting, these poems constantly remind us of what it means to be human.

Katrina Porteous’s Rhizodont is a polyphonic hymn to England’s North-East coast, burrowing in ‘ware stink / and salty tangle’ as it ranges nimbly across historical timescales and between Northumbrian dialect and scientific discourse. Contemporary dog walkers inhabit the same space as sooty collieries and Scotch gutters; in turn, the recent industrial past fades into the sound of the waves, a blackbird with soil on his whiskers, and the longer and stranger movements of geological time, when Northumberland was a tropical swamp and huge freshwater fish began hauling themselves onto land. Intimate and elegiac as a record of the recent past, Rhizodont is also a dazzling meditation on the relationship between man, nature, and machine.

Inspired by obituaries for Huguette Clark, a reclusive American billionaire, Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Top Doll is a bravura animation of the vast doll collection Huguette left after her death at the age of 104, voiced in a compendium of poetic forms. Top Doll, aka Dolly, talks in Franglais sonnet coronas, Lady Mamiko in haibun, motley Barbies in abecedarians. Revolving from Fifth Avenue to the palaces of Japan to slave plantations in Virginia while, offstage, ‘Maman’ slowly dies of cancer, McCarthy Woolf, ending this fabulous tour de force with more obituaries, comes full circle.

The winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 is Peter Gizzi for Fierce Elegy.

Owing to the Chair’s illness, this speech was given on Mimi Khalvati’s behalf by judge Hannah Sullivan at the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 Award Ceremony at the Wallace Collection, London, on 13 January 2025.