We’re finding it hard to wait until January for the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings at the Southbank’s Royal Festival Hall… so we thought we’d relive some of the previous events by asking those who have taken part about their experiences.

Daljit Nagra has been shortlisted twice for the T. S. Eliot Prize: with Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (Faber & Faber) in 2011, and in 2013 for Ramayana (Faber & Faber). He also judged the Prize with Sinéad Morrissey (Chair) and Clare Pollard in 2018. Here’s what the innovative performer had to say about taking the stage at the Eliot Prize Readings…

The grand platform offered by the Eliot Prize Readings at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall – a seven-minute blast with breath-sensitive acoustics in front of a large audience – has always inspired me to think freshly.

For my reading from Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!!, shortlisted in 2011, I read a poem in two voices – an exchange between a doting British-Indian male addressing an Indian woman who wants to dump her cheating partner. When my version of the Indian epic Ramayana was shortlisted in 2013, I upped the voice count again. On stage I had my wife Katherine, along with exciting new poets Richard Scott and Edward Doegar, to help me enact a scene involving a narrator, two angry apes, an ape’s wife and a bull.

My aim was to do justice to the words on the page, to revive the oral tradition that the poems responded to, and to demonstrate to the audience a way to imagine the poems once they were going to be read in their book form.

Another Eliot Readings highlight was when I had the great privilege of being invited to read from Derek Walcott’s White Egrets, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2010. Seamus Heaney, who was also in contention that year, was seated next to me at the Readings. He told me at the end that he was soon off to St Lucia to visit Derek Walcott and that he’d be telling him what a great job I did – I couldn’t have been any happier. Perhaps I did such a great job, delivering the sonnets, that I secured Walcott his win at the award event the following day?

See and hear the Eliot Prize experience for yourself by booking now for the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings 2025 at 7pm on Sunday 18 January 2026. The event will be British Sign Language (BSL) interpreted and includes live captioning. Tickets are available from the Southbank Centre’s website or by calling their box office on 020 3879 9555. You can also join us from the comfort of your own home via the live stream.