Book now to see Eliot winners Karen Solie and Don Paterson at Cheltenham Literature Festival

Tickets are now on sale for an extra special T. S. Eliot Prize event at The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival (9–18 October). Karen Solie, winner of the 2025 Prize for Wellwater, will be joined by the only poet to win the Eliot twice, Don Paterson.

This is a fantastic opportunity to hear two distinctive and insightful poets who have worked closely together read from and talk about their work. The event will take place in Cheltenham Town Hall at 5pm on Friday 16 October. Tickets (£14) are on sale now.

Karen Solie’s Wellwater (Picador Poetry) was chosen as the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2025. Chair of the judges Michael Hofmann wrote:

The poems of Wellwater come from the whole of an adventurously lived life. They hold the two sentiments, The world is a beautiful place / The world is a terrible place, in perfect equipoise. They offer no happy endings, no salvation in past or future, in epiphany or private happiness. And yet they are anything but grim, with an ironic humour that plays over our increasingly euphemism-hungry culture.

Wellwater also won the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry, the Forward Prize for Best Collection (jointly with Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Avidyā) and was shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize. In 2026 Solie was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry. She splits her time between her native Canada and the UK where she teaches at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She is part of North Sea Poets, a collective of poets with national and international reputations based near the east coast of Scotland.

Don Paterson is also a North Sea Poet and signed Solie to the Picador list during his twenty-five year tenure as Poetry Editor. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. Of his sixteen collections, both God’s Gift to Women (1997) and Landing Light (2003) won the Eliot Prize, and he has been shortlisted on two other occasions. His latest books are The Arctic (Faber & Faber, 2022) and the memoir Toy Fights: A Boyhood (Faber & Faber, 2023).

For full details and to book tickets for the T. S. Eliot Prize event visit the Festival website.