Jane Clarke and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin are two of the ten shortlisted poets for this year’s TS Eliot Prize
Jane Clarke and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin are two of ten poets shortlisted for this year’s TS Eliot Poetry Prize, the most valuable in British and Irish poetry. The award is given annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland, with the winning poet receiving £25,000 and all shortlisted poets receiving £1,500.
It’s the only major poetry prize to be judged solely by established poets, and this year Sasha Dugdale, Denise Saul, and Paul Muldoon made up the judging panel who read 186 collections before drawing up their final list.
Jane Clarke is shortlisted for her collection A Change in The Air (Bloodaxe), which poet Eleanor Hooker said revealed outstanding poems of place and heart, in her engagement with the text for Books Ireland.
“Clarke’s poems are above all else accessible, and in being so, the poet honours her reader. She removes a language blind, bringing us to the beating heart of her work. A Change in the Air is a generous collection by a poet resolute but gentle in the matter of emotional truth.”
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is shortlisted with The Map of the World (Gallery Press), which abounds in tales half-told or hinted at for which her poetry is widely admired—but which reaches further into the whole weight of history, offering ideas about how to engage with the past.
Already celebrated poems such as ‘St Brigid’s Well’ and ‘Muriel Gifford After Her Fever’ mix with lines prompted by Milton and Marvell and the artists Nano Reid and Helen Moloney to ‘hold in view / history’s patched lining, the sewing’.
The shortlist
Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant
More Sky by Joe Carrick-Varty
A Change in the Air by Jane Clarke
The Map of the World, by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, by Katie Farris
The Ink Cloud Reader by Kit Fan
I Think We’re Alone Now by Abigail Parry
School of Instructions by Ishion Hutchinson
Hyena! by Fran Lock
Balladz by Sharon Olds.
Talking about the shortlisted collections, Paul Muldoon said that they speak of and to their moment: “If there’s a single word for that moment it is surely ‘disrupted’, and all these poets properly reflect that disruption. Shot through though they are with images of grief, migration, and conflict, they are nonetheless imbued with energy and joy. The names of some poets will be familiar, others less so; all will find a place in your head and heart.”
