Tim Liardet is a poet twice nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize, a critic, and Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University. He was born in London in 1949, and has produced eleven collections of poetry to date.
Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet and playwright, who also edits, broadcasts, lectures and translates from Welsh into English. She co-founded Tŷ Newydd, a writers' centre in North Wales.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize that was, for many years, awarded by the Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T S Eliot Estate. The T S Eliot Foundation took over the running of the T S Eliot Prize in 2016, appointing Chris Holifield, formerly director of the Poetry Book Society as its new director, when the former Poetry Book Society charity had to be wound up, with its book club and company name taken over by book sales agency Inpress Ltd in Newcastle. At present, the prize money is £20,000, with each of nine runners-up receiving £1500 each, making it the United Kingdom's most valuable annual poetry competition. The Prize has been called "the most coveted award in poetry".
Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. On 1 October 2019, she took up the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Sinéad Morrissey is a Northern Irish poet. In January 2014 she won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax and in 2017 she won the Forward Prize for Poetry for her sixth collection On Balance.
John Burnside FRSL FRSE is a Scottish writer, born in Dunfermline. He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book.
Leontia Flynn is a poet and writer from Northern Ireland. She grew up between the towns of Dundrum and Newcastle, County Down, Northern Ireland. She is the second-youngest of five siblings. She has worked at The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University Belfast since 2005.
David John Constantine is an English poet, author and translator.
Jean Sprackland is an English poet and writer, the author of five collections of poetry and two books of essays about place and nature.
Roger Robinson is a British writer, musician and performer who lives between England and Trinidad. His book A Portable Paradise won the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize 2019, announced in London in January 2020. He is the second writer of Caribbean heritage to win the prize, the highest value award in UK poetry, after Derek Walcott who won the 2010 prize. Robinson's victory was also seen as an important one for small presses. A Portable Paradise was only the second book of poetry to win the Ondaatje Prize in May 2020.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Sarah Howe is a Chinese–British poet, editor and researcher in English literature. Her first full poetry collection, Loop of Jade, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of The Year Award. It is the first time that the T. S. Eliot Prize has been given to a debut collection. She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow in English at University College London, as well as a trustee of The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry.
Fiona Benson is an English poet. Her collections have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2015 and 2019. Vertigo and Ghost (2019) won Forward Prizes for best collection.
Hannah Sullivan is a British academic and poet. She is the author of The Work of Revision, which won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and the University English Book Prize, as well as the poetry collection Three Poems, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize. She is associate professor of English literature at New College, Oxford.
Ailbhe Darcy is an Irish poet and Wales Book of the Year award laureate.
Fire Songs is a collection of poetry written by David Harsent that uses multiple themes to display a greater meaning. It was published in 2014, and it won the T.S. Eliot Prize that year. It is the 11th collection of poems that Harsent has published.
The Water Table is a collection of poetry written by Philip Gross in 2009, published by Bloodaxe Books. It won the 2009 T.S Eliot poetry Prize.
The Drowned Book is a collection of poetry written by Sean O'Brien, a British poet, critic, novelist, broadcaster, and playwright. In 2007 it was awarded with The Forward prize for best collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2007. The book was reprinted in 2015, with an introduction from poet and novelist Helen Dunmore, and a revision that gave it 16 more pages and a new cover.
Parallax is the fifth poetry collection written by Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey. First published in 2013, by Carcanet Press, the collection of poems focus on the premise of the appearance and position of an object being changed by the change in the position of the observer. In 2015, after becoming the fourth shortlisted poem written by Morrissey, it received the T. S. Eliot Prize.
