The T. S. Eliot Prize 2019

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry and fiction have appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky Arts, and have been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Granta, The Rialto, Oxford Poetry and The Feminist Review. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow of the University of Roehampton. He has toured extensively in Europe and Australia. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a poetry and live music night in London, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. After the Formalities is his breakthrough poetry collection.

anthonyanaxagorou.com

Jay Bernard is the author of the pamphlets Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (both Tall Lighthouse, 2008), English Breakfast (Math Paper Press, 2013) and The Red and Yellow Nothing (Ink Sweat & Tears Press, 2016). A film programmer at BFI Flare and an archivist at Statewatch, they also participated in ‘The Complete Works II’ project in 2014, in which they were mentored by Kei Miller. Jay was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2005 and a winner of SLAMbassadors UK spoken word championship. Surge is their debut collection and won the 2017 Ted Hughes Award with Surge: Side A.

jaybernard.co.uk

Photo © Joshua Virasami

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He has published five collections of poetry with Picador, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998), which won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, The Ice Age (2002), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and won the Whitbread Poetry Award, Tramp in Flames (2006), The Atlantic Tunnel: Selected Poems (2010) and The Dark Film (2012). He was named as a Next Generation Poet in 2004. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

Photo © Jennifer Kuhfeld

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, in the former Soviet Union, and now lives in the US. Deaf Republic is his first poetry collection to be published in the UK.  He is the author of two previous collections published in the US, Musica Humana (Chapiteau Press, 2002) and Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004). He is also co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

ilyakaminsky.com

Photo © Cybele Knowles

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, educated at Stanford and Columbia universities, and has lived for many years in New York City. Her thirteen poetry collections include Satan Says (1980), The Dead & the Living (1984), which received the Lamont Poetry Selection and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and One Secret Thing (2008). Her books have won many awards over the years. Her collection Stag’s Leap (Cape 2013) won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. In 2016 she won the Wallace Stevens award for her ‘outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry’.

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015), His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe 2019) won a Northern Writers Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and is shortlisted for both the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. He is moving to the US in January 2020 to teach at Harvard.

Photo © Jenny Holden

Deryn Rees-Jones was born in Liverpool with family links to North Wales. Her poetry collections (all Seren) are The Memory Tray (1995), Signs Round a Dead Body (1998), Quiver (2004) and Burying the Wren (2012), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Consorting with Angels, on 20^th century women’s poetry, was published alongside Modern Women Poets (both Bloodaxe, 2005). In 2004 Deryn was chosen as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation poets. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool, and is the editor of the new Pavilion Poetry series for Liverpool University Press.

derynrees-jones.co.uk

Roger Robinson is a writer and performer who lives between London and Trinidad. He has published two poetry pamphlets with flipped eye, Suitcase (2004) and Suckle (2009), which won the People’s Book Prize and the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize. His first full poetry collection, The Butterfly Hotel (2013), was shortlisted for The OCM Bocas Poetry Prize and his second is A Portable Paradise (2019), both Peepal Tree Press. He is an alumni of The Complete Works and was a co-founder of both Spoke Lab and the international writing collective Malika’s Kitchen. He is the lead vocalist and lyricist for King Midas Sound.

rogerrobinsononline.com

Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. She is the author of six collections of poems including Short Haul Engine, Modern & Normal, Pigeon, which won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, The Road In Is not the Same Road Out and The Living Option: Selected Poems (2013). She was International Writer-in-Residence at the University of St Andrews in 2011, and is an Associate Director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio program. Her first UK collection, The Living Option: Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe in 2013 and her second is The Caiplie Caves (Picador 2019). She lives in Toronto, but is currently teaching at the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.