T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 shortlist
by Brandon King
The T. S. Eliot Prize, which former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion has described as “the Prize poets most want to win”, is an annual prize for the best new poetry collection published in the UK or Ireland.
Take a look at these emotive poems, available to borrow from our catalogue.
Self-Portrait as Othello, by Jason Allen-Paisant
This second collection from the 2022 OCM Bocas Poetry Prize winner re-imagines Shakespeare's Othello for the modern age, intertwining the identities of 'immigrant' and 'Black'.
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More Sky, by Joe Carrick-Varty
This debut collection is an exploration of grief, addiction, violence, mental illness, and working-class masculinity framed within the dynamic of a father/son relationship.
A Change in the Air, by Jane Clarke
Jane Clarke's third collection is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place, exploring how people, landscape and culture shape us. Voices of the past and present show courage in the face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and everyday losses in what is essentially a book of love poems to our beautiful, fragile world.
The Ink Cloud Reader, by Kit Fan
Kit Fan takes enormous risks linguistically, formally and visually to process the news of a sudden illness and the threat of mortality, set against the larger chaos of his beloved city Hong Kong and our broken planet. These shape-shifting poems are persistently sensitive to anxiety, and to beauty, questioning the turbulent climate of our time while celebrating the power of ink - of reading and writing.
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, by Katie Farris
A memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of 36 during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. With humour and honesty, the book portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn't hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life - even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on. This book is for anyone who's ever asked how to live in the face of suffering, and doesn't expect an easy answer.
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School of Instructions, by Ishion Hutchinson
In language that is sensuous and biblical, 'School of Instructions' centres on the experience of West Indian volunteer soldiers in British regiments during the First World War. The poem gathers the psychic and physical terrors of these Black soldiers in the Middle East war theatre and refracts their struggle against the colonial power they served. The narratives of the soldiers overlap with Godspeed, a young schoolboy living in rural Jamaica of the 1990s.
This visionary collision, written in a form Ishion Hutchinson calls 'contrapuntal versets', unsettles time and event. It reshapes grand gestures of heroism into a music of supple, vigilant intensity. Elegiac and odic, epochal and lyrical, the triumph of 'School of Instructions' is how it confronts the legacy of imperial silencing and etches shards of remembrances into a form of survival.
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Hyena!, by Fran Lock
The Hyena! poems are concerned with therianthropy – the magical transformation of people into animals – as a metaphor for the embodied effects of sudden and traumatic loss. Through the figure of Hyena! Fran negotiates the multiple fraught intersections of dirty animality, femininity, grief, class and culture to produce a work of queer mourning, a furious feral lament. Hyenas in legend and lore are shape-shifters, and Fran's work has been said to shape-shift between lyric and innovative modes, fiercely concerned with the expansion of "innovative" to include the kinds of poetry and performance strategy typically accessible to and practiced by working-class and marginalised people.
The Map of the World, by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Although 'The Map of the World' abounds in the tales half-told or hinted at for which Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's poetry is widely admired this book reaches further into the ways one might confront misfortune and disaster and the whole weight of history. Her images present ideas about how to engage with the past and about other genres' representations of it.
Balladz, by Sharon Olds
Arguably America's greatest living poet, Sharon Olds enters her eightieth year with a book for our times: a book of fear, fragililty and love of life. Renowned for her poetry of searing honesty, sexual frankness and brave originality, Olds' 'Balladz' emerges 'at the eleventh hour of the end of the world', from the time of plague, this time of loss, where she can look at the world and her life and tell us plainly 'love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing.'
I Think We're Alone Now, by Abigail Parry
Abigail Parry's second collection was supposed to be about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, partnership and collective responsibility. Instead the poems relate to pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Anything except what intimacy is or looks like.
Borrow I Think We're Alone Now →
Looking for more reading inspiration? Take a look at our recommendations for all ages.