{"id":11632,"date":"2026-01-21T11:41:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T11:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/?p=11632"},"modified":"2026-01-21T13:30:56","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T13:30:56","slug":"11632-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/11632-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Hofmann on the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Michael Hofmann, Chair of judges, T. S. Eliot Prize 2025. Photo \u00a9 Adrian Pope for the T. S. Eliot Prize<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

T. S. Eliot Prize 2025: the Chair of judges\u2019 speech, by Michael Hofmann<\/h3>\n

‘Good evening, happy Martin Luther King Day.<\/p>\n

I call to mind the Auden statement, probably mis-reported or mis-remembered, that: \u2018Poetry makes nothing happen\u2019, and I think: well, at least there\u2019s that. Do no harm. Hippocrates, not hypocrisy. Given what does happen, doesn\u2019t nothing feel preferable to something? So, there are these shapes on the page, these broken off lines, vulnerable and inefficient, unviable, uneconomical, these inked simulacra of a human voice, and the weeks and months that some people take over making them, and the minutes and hours that \u2013 sometimes the same people \u2013 spend while reading them. What\u2019s not to like? It feels like a little ray of sunshine, if that comparison isn\u2019t already too toxic. Would that there were more of that, the concomitant silence, the pottery concentration \u2018about the time I own\u2019, the doing something invisible and, in real world terms, supposedly inconsequential. This thing that the incomparable Les Murray describes in \u2018First Essay on Interest\u2019:<\/p>\n

Interest. Mild and inherent with fire as oxygen,
\nIt is a sporadic inhalation. We can live long days
\nUnder its surface, breathing material air<\/p>\n

Then something catches, is itself. Intent and special silence.
\nThis is interest, that blinks our interests out
\nAnd alone permits their survival, by relieving<\/p>\n

Us of their gravity, for a timeless moment;
\nThat centres where it points, and points to centering,
\nThat centres us where it points, and reflects our centre.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or that Gottfried Benn, more bitterly and pithily, called \u2018the unremunerated work of the spirit\u2019.<\/p>\n

Patience and Niall and I read \u2013 I totted them up \u2013 some ten thousand pages of poetry these past months. Separate experiences were had, so no doubt too different experiences. Here are a few of mine. Books starting on page 1 (something I deprecate). Books longer than I remember books being. What happened to 48 pp? Or even 64 pp?\u00a0 Books coming with pages, sometimes many pages, of notes. More thanks in them than an Oscar speech. Ultimate perfectibility of layout has been attained, a kind of visual bullying, even visual cant, I think. What Randall Jarrell called poems written on typewriters by typewriters. And of course too, as per Jarrell, the stacks of signed plaster casts, with the awful unvarying refrain: it hurts here. At the same time, poets and books all desperately presented as going concerns. I miss the absence of fluff and puff, \u00a0a kind of austerity, demureness of representation. Dignity.<\/p>\n

It seems too that there\u2019s been a turn to abstract speech, inhuman speech, impersonal speech. Something randomised, a distrust of language, even a dislike of language. Arnold\u2019s criticism of life has devolved to a criticism of language. A poem is now the home for randomised and intelligent and inorganic speech. A conveyor of information. A kind of insider trading. The books we shortlisted here are either exceptional, virtuosic instances of that, or they are irregular, violations, not subject to these loosely described trends. I want to congratulate the authors. Alphabetically, in no particular order:<\/p>\n

Gillian Allnutt<\/strong> \u2013 Lode<\/em> carries echoes of Geoffrey Hill and Basil Bunting in her tender musings on words and plants and walks and persons over a long life, \u2018the now and then of wood pigeon \/ its dear inconsequential circumlocution\u2019.<\/p>\n

Isabelle Baafi<\/strong> \u2013 Chaotic Good<\/em> quantities of imagination and intensity matched by discipline. A wild, even a ferocious poetry with folktale simplicity, bitter puns and little waste. \u2018[Y]ours with the flick of a pain\u2019 or \u2018He had a wisdom deep enough to stand in, and I did\u2019.<\/p>\n

Catherine-Esther Cowie<\/strong> \u2013 Heirloom<\/em>: beautiful audible mingling of Creole and English, ranging up and down her family tree, singing the history of generations of cruelty and colonial violence and a desperate longing for tenderness.<\/p>\n

Paul Farley<\/strong> \u2013 When It Rained for a Million Years<\/em>: sprightly, smart, good-humoured poems, attractive and resourceful. Many outstanding individual poems: about a butcher\u2019s block, about the poet\u2019s room way back when, about beavers, about turkeys and cows. To anyone who\u2019s read the book, you have only to name the subject, and a smile will pass across their face. Nothing arcane, deeply familiar things, \u2018A roof joist cracking. The pilot light bumping on\u2019 just marmalised.<\/p>\n

Vona Groarke<\/strong> \u2013 Infinity Pool<\/em> is a book very low on names and labels, the expected authenticity markers, but very close to a real sense of the speaker who may or may not be the poet. Numbers of very short poems are also a rarity these days. Overall, there\u2019s a sense of a ravel of feelings, not noisy but all the more genuine. Poems spun, it seems, out of sheer air.<\/p>\n

Sarah Howe<\/strong> \u2013 Foretokens<\/em>: a neat and very deliberate language-y poetry on successive generations that manages to be both personal and impersonal; palimpsests, erasures, recordings, ekphrases, concrete poems, the DNA of her preoccupations twisting and doubling back on itself.<\/p>\n

Nick Makoha<\/strong> \u2013 The New Carthaginians<\/em> reads like a synthesised global thriller, Basquiat and Icarus and Carlos the Jackal and the poet\u2019s father whirled past the eye of the reader in blocks of type comprising short, dramatic sentences. A Hollywood armature with its own playlist, set in a bold and gumptious shuffle.<\/p>\n

Tom Paulin<\/strong> \u2013 Namanlagh<\/em>: these might be described as Tom Paulin\u2019s retrobottega poems, poems that came into being unknown to anyone, practically to the poet himself as two friends, Jamie McKendrick and Bernard O\u2019Donoghue, took receipt of the poems from Paulin\u2019s wife Giti, and made them into a manuscript describing struggles with depression, memories of the Troubles and even further back in Ulster history. He has given us the double negative in a new way: \u2018[N]either this time nor this place \/ is right for you\u2019. Or \u2018[S]ome rugged province \/ you\u2019d quite like to visit \/ but not now and not yet\u2019. Paulin\u2019s trademark style, very short abrupt lines with full rhymes and a sour or bitter speaker is on magnificent display here.<\/p>\n

Natalie Shapero<\/strong> \u2013 Stay Dead<\/em>: who says Americans can\u2019t do irony? But probably the entire nation\u2019s annual supply is all with Shapero, who writes dry, nimble, defeatist, and cleverly recursive poems. Based now in LA, she works through the film industry, while also taking in signal non-actors like Monet and Rothko. It\u2019s not blood, it\u2019s red, she cites that other ironist, Jean-Luc Godard.<\/p>\n

Karen Solie<\/strong> \u2013 Wellwater<\/em>: the death of Karen Solie\u2019s father, a farmer in the Canadian mid-West seems to have brought the poet back there for longer, to consider the place where she grew up, and the changes that have befallen it. Solie brings her characteristic sympathy for other living creatures, a swooping of intellectual content and surprise, and a new emphasis on ethics.<\/p>\n

The winner is Karen Solie!’<\/i><\/p>\n

This speech was given by Michael Hofmann, Chair of judges, at the T. S. Eliot Prize 2025 Award Ceremony at the Wallace Collection, London, on 19 January 2026.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

T. S. Eliot Prize 2025: the Chair of judges\u2019 speech, by Michael Hofmann ‘Good evening, happy Martin Luther King Day. I call to mind the Auden statement, probably mis-reported or mis-remembered, that: \u2018Poetry makes nothing happen\u2019, and I think: well, at least there\u2019s that. Do no harm. Hippocrates, not hypocrisy. Given what does happen, doesn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":11625,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[111,39],"class_list":["post-11632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-111","tag-winner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11632"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11645,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11632\/revisions\/11645"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}