Ten poets, including Tom Paulin and Sarah Howe, have been shortlisted for the £25,000 TS Eliot Prize, the UK and Ireland's most prestigious award for a single poetry volume. The shortlist features a mix of established names and new voices, with collections ranging from meditations on illness and inheritance to explorations of ecological collapse and exile.
Chair of judges Michael Hofmann praised the 'great range, suggestiveness and power' of the shortlist, noting that 'from Entebbe to Manitoba, from blocks of text to threads of voice, there is something here for everyone.' The shortlist was selected from a record 177 submissions by 64 publishers.
Howe, who won the prize in 2015 with Loop of Jade, is nominated for Foretokens, while Paulin returns for the fourth time with his first collection in a decade, Namanlagh, described by Andrew O'Hagan as 'a tone-perfect meditation on illness and recovery, partnership and writing, violence and historical neglect.'
Other shortlisted poets include Gillian Allnutt, Isabelle Baafi, Catherine-Esther Cowie, Paul Farley, Vona Groarke, Nick Makoha, Natalie Shapero and Karen Solie. Makoha's The New Carthaginians uses the 1976 hijacking of Air France flight 139 to explore empire, migration and memory, while Farley's When It Rained for a Million Years folds geological time into present anxieties about the planet.
The shortlist readings will take place on 18 January 2026 at the Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall, with the winner announced the following evening. The judging panel also includes poets Patience Agbabi and Niall Campbell. The most recent winner of the prize, now in its 32nd year, was Peter Gizzi for Fierce Elegy.
