Tom Paulin and Sarah Howe are among the poets shortlisted for this year’s £25,000 TS Eliot prize, the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious award for a single volume of poetry.
The shortlist features 10 collections from established names and new voices, ranging from meditations on illness and inheritance to explorations of ecological collapse and exile.
Howe, who won the prize in 2015 with her debut Loop of Jade, is this time nominated for Foretokens. Meanwhile, Paulin returns to the shortlist for the fourth time with his first collection in a decade, Namanlagh, described by Andrew O’Hagan in the Guardian as “a tone-perfect meditation on illness and recovery, partnership and writing, violence and historical neglect”.
Chair of judges, the poet and translator Michael Hofmann, praised the “great range, suggestiveness and power” of the shortlist. “From Entebbe to Manitoba, from blocks of text to threads of voice, there is something here for everyone.”
Joining Paulin and Howe on the list are Gillian Allnutt, Isabelle Baafi, Catherine-Esther Cowie, Paul Farley, Vona Groarke, Nick Makoha, Natalie Shapero and Karen Solie.
From the postwar reflections of Allnutt’s Lode to Baafi’s Chaotic Good, a debut praised in the Guardian for its “fierce critique of a toxic marriage and a redemptive vision through poetry,” the shortlist responds to personal and global histories, spanning continents and centuries.
Makoha’s The New Carthaginians uses the 1976 hijacking of Air France flight 139 to explore the entangled histories of empire, migration and memory, moving from Entebbe to New York, and from Icarus to Basquiat. “Like Dante entering hell through a rip in the universe, Makoha enters history … fragments of the past fly around us like swirling leaves in a tempest,” wrote Philip Terry in a Guardian review.
Elsewhere, Farley’s When It Rained for a Million Years has been described as “startlingly imaginative”, a collection that folds geological time into present anxieties about the planet. Solie’s Wellwater continues this ecological thread – a “blazingly honest catalogue of human-made hazard and harm”, according to a Guardian review by Jade Cuttle.
Meanwhile, American poet Shapero is shortlisted for Stay Dead, a darkly witty meditation on mortality.
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 shortlist was selected from a record 177 submissions by 64 publishers.
Alongside Hofmann on the judging panel for this year’s prize are the poets Patience Agbabi and Niall Campbell.
The most recent winner of the prize, now in its 32nd year, was Peter Gizzi for Fierce Elegy.
