T. S. Eliot Prize 2020 ‘unsettling, captivating and compelling’ Shortlist announced

Judges Lavinia Greenlaw (Chair), Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan have chosen the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist from 153 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers.

The shortlist comprises work from five men and five women; two Americans; as well as poets of Native American, Chinese Indonesian and British, Indian and mixed race ancestry. Nine publishers are represented, more than for many years, with five titles from new or recently-established presses. There are three debut collections.

Natalie Diaz – Postcolonial Love Poem (Faber & Faber)

Sasha Dugdale Deformations (Carcanet Press)

Ella Frears Shine, Darling (Offord Road Books)

Will Harris RENDANG (Granta Poetry)

Wayne Holloway Smith Love Minus Love (Bloodaxe Books)

Bhanu Kapil How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry)

Daisy Lafarge Life Without Air (Granta Poetry)

Glyn Maxwell How the hell are you (Picador Poetry)

Shane McCrae Sometimes I Never Suffered (Corsair Poetry)

J. O. Morgan The Martian’s Regress (Cape Poetry)

For full information on the shortlisted poets and their collections, visit our Shortlist page.

Lavinia Greenlaw said:

My fellow judges, Mona Arshi, Andrew McMillan and I have been reading books written in a different world, the one before Covid-19. The urgency and vitality of the ten books on this shortlist commanded our attention nonetheless. We were unsettled, captivated and compelled. Poetry is the most resilient, potent, capacious and universal art we have.

An announcement will follow about the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings and the T. S. Eliot Prize Award Ceremony.

The T. S. Eliot Prize is run by The T. S. Eliot Foundation. The T. S. Eliot Prize is the most valuable prize in British poetry – the winning poet will receive a cheque for £25,000 and the shortlisted poets will be presented with cheques for £1,500. It is the only major poetry prize which is judged purely by established poets. The 2020 judging panel are looking for the best new poetry collection written in English and published in 2020.

The weekly T. S. Eliot Prize newsletter will provide essential background on the shortlisted poets, including links to specially-commissioned new videos, readers’ notes and reviews. Click here to subscribe.

Last year’s winner was Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise and the judges were John Burnside (Chair), Sarah Howe and Nick Makoha.

Related Works

#0d7490
WINNER
2020
Pavilion Poetry (Liverpool University Press)
Offord Road Books
Granta Poetry

Related Poets

Andrew McMillan lives in Manchester. His debut collection physical (Cape Poetry, 2016) was the only poetry collection ever to have won the Guardian First Book Award. It...
Mona Arshi was born in West London to Punjabi parents. She worked as a human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry. Her...
Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London. She has published six collections of poetry with Faber & Faber, including: Minsk (2003), which was shortlisted for the...
Wayne Holloway-Smith was born in Wiltshire and lives in London. His first book-length collection, Alarum (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), was a Poetry Book Society Wildcard Choice...
Will Harris is a writer of Chinese Indonesian and British heritage, born and based in London. His poetry pamphlet, All this is implied (HappenStance 2017),...
Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California and lives in New York City. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including In the...
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila...
Bhanu Kapil was born in England to Indian parents, and she grew up in a South Asian, working-class community in London. She lives in the...
Daisy Lafarge was born in Hastings and studied at the University of Edinburgh. She has published two pamphlets: understudies for air (Sad Press, 2017) and capriccio (SPAM Press, 2019),...
Ella Frears is a poet and visual artist based in London. Her pamphlet Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity was published by Goldsmiths Press. Her debut collection Shine, Darling (Offord...

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