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.
Michael Longley was a Northern Irish poet. Following his death, the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, called Longley "a peerless poet".
The Forward Prizes for Poetry are major British awards for poetry, presented annually at a public ceremony in London. They were founded in 1992 by William Sieghart with the aim of celebrating excellence in poetry and increasing its audience. The prizes do this by identifying and honouring talent: collections published in the UK and Ireland over the course of the previous year are eligible, as are single poems nominated by journal editors or prize organisers. Each year, works shortlisted for the prizes – plus those highly commended by the judges – are collected in the Forward Book of Poetry.
Daljit Nagra is a British poet whose debut collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover! – a title alluding to W. H. Auden's Look, Stranger!, D. H. Lawrence's Look! We Have Come Through! and by epigraph also to Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" – was published by Faber in February 2007. Nagra's poems relate to the experience of Indians born in the UK, and often employ language that imitates the English spoken by Indian immigrants whose first language is Punjabi, which some have termed "Punglish". He currently works part-time at JFS School in Kenton, London, and visits schools, universities and festivals where he performs his work. He is a professor of creative writing at Brunel University London.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer. She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
David John Constantine is an English poet, short story writer, novelist, and translator.
Thomas Bolt was an American fiction writer, poet, and artist.
Jericho Brown is an American poet and writer. Born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, Brown has worked as an educator at institutions such as the University of Houston, the University of San Diego, and Emory University. His poems have been published in The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, Oxford American, and The New Yorker, among others. He released his first book of prose and poetry, Please, in 2008. His second book, The New Testament, was released in 2014. His 2019 collection of poems, The Tradition, garnered widespread critical acclaim.
Rachel Mann is a British Anglican priest, poet and feminist theologian. She is a trans woman who writes, speaks and broadcasts on a wide range of topics including gender, sexuality and religion. She has served as Archdeacon of Bolton and of Salford since 2023.
The Mancunion is the University of Manchester Students' Union's student newspaper. It is the largest student newspaper in the United Kingdom and is distributed throughout Greater Manchester. The name is a portmanteau of Mancunian, the demonym for residents of Manchester, and union, given its role as the newspaper of the Students' Union. Past writers include film critics Mark Kermode.
Mona Arshi is a British poet and novelist. She won the Forward Prize for Poetry, Best First Collection in 2015 for her debut collection, Small Hands. She has also won the Manchester Poetry Prize. Her debut novel, Somebody Loves You, was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize.
Adam Lowe is a British writer, performer and publisher from Leeds who currently lives in Manchester. He is the UK's LGBT+ History Month Poet Laureate and was Yorkshire's Poet for 2012. He writes poetry, plays and fiction, and he occasionally performs as Beyonce Holes.
Raymond Antrobus is a British poet, educator and writer who has been performing poetry since 2007. In March 2019, he won the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry. In May 2019, Antrobus became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for his collection The Perseverance, praised by chair of the judges as "an immensely moving book of poetry which uses his deaf experience, bereavement and Jamaican-British heritage to consider the ways we all communicate with each other." Antrobus was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.
Ian Humphreys is a British poet. His debut collection, Zebra, published in 2019 with Nine Arches Press, was nominated for the Portico Prize. His second poetry collection, Tormentil, won a 2022 Royal Society of Literature Literature Matters Award.
K Patrick is a Scottish poet, novelist and short story writer. Patrick has been shortlisted for the White Review Prize for both poetry and short fiction and for the BBC National Short Story Award. Their debut novel was published in 2023 and their debut poetry collection in 2024. They live in Scotland.
The Complete Works was a national development programme for Black and Asian poets in England, 2008–2020, created on the initiative of Bernardine Evaristo, which mentored many major prizewinners and went on to inspire similar schemes.
Jayant Kashyap is an Indian poet and academic. In 2021, his poem 'Earth, Fire', written after Yvonne Reddick's 'Translating Mountains from the Gaelic', won the Young Poets competition at the Wells Festival of Literature, judged by the poet Phoebe Stuckes. Kashyap's first pamphlet, Survival, was published by Clare Songbirds Publishing House in 2019, and his second, Unaccomplished Cities, was published by Ghost City Press in 2020. In 2021, Skear Zines published a limited-edition zine, Water. His third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, won the Poetry Business New Poets Prize in 2024, judged by the poet Holly Hopkins. He is the only India-based winner of both the Wells Festival of Literature's Young Poets competition, and of the New Poets Prize.
The Poetry Business are an independent press, and a writer development agency, based in Sheffield. Since 1986, they have run workshops, mentorships, competitions and more. The poet duo Peter and Ann Sansom, are the directors of the Poetry Business.
Kim Moore is an English poet from Leicester who lives and works in West Yorkshire. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011, and her debut collection The Art of Falling won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2017. Her second collection All the Men I Never Married was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2022.
Magma Poetry, better known as Magma, is a London-based poetry magazine, publishing work on and about poetry, and known for appointing a different editor every issue. It was founded by Helen Nicholson and Laurie Smith in 1994, with its first issue edited by Smith, and appearing in March 1994. Since 1994, a total of 91 issues of Magma have appeared by December 2024. The team run the Magma Poetry, Pamphlet and Subscribers-only competitions.
