Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist and playwright. He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His use of language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
Pascale Petit, is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. She was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She has travelled widely, particularly in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon and India.
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 for 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 for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) for "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, Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
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. From 1 October 2019 until 30 September 2023, she was the Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Anthony Joseph FRSL is a British/Trinidadian poet, novelist, musician and academic. In 2023, he was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize for his book Sonnets for Albert.
David John Constantine is an English poet, author and translator.
Roger Robinson is a British writer, musician and performer who lives between England and Trinidad. He is best known for A Portable Paradise, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2019.
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 (2015), 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 2014, 2019, and 2022. Vertigo and Ghost (2019) won the Forward Prize for Poetry for Best Collection.
Joelle Taylor RSL is a poet, playwright and author. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a 2016 collection of poetry by Vietnamese American poet and essayist Ocean Vuong. The book won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2017—which made him the youngest winner of the award at the time at 29 years old, as well as the second-ever debut poet to receive it. The book also won the Whiting Award in 2016.
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.
Fire Songs is a collection of poetry written by English poet 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.
Jacqueline Saphra is a poet and writer. Her debut collection The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions was nominated for the Aldeburgh Prize. Works since then include If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing but Naked Women and A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a British-born Ghanaian poet.
