The Canadian poet Karen Solie has won the 2025 TS Eliot poetry prize for a collection of work, Wellwater, which explores the destruction of the natural world.
Solie was announced as the winner at a ceremony held at the Wallace Collection on Monday evening, and will receive £25,000 in prize money from the TS Eliot Foundation. Wellwater, her sixth collection, co-won the Forward prize for best collection last October, alongside Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Avidyā.
Solie’s five previous collections are Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out and The Caiplie Caves, for which she was nominated for the TS Eliot prize in 2019.
Wellwater emerged from a shortlist that included Tom Paulin’s Namanlagh, Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good, Nick Makoha’s The New Carthaginians and Sarah Howe’s Foretokens. Solie teaches half-time at the University of St Andrews, and lives in Canada the rest of the year.
The judging panel consisted of the poets Michael Hofmann, Patience Agbabi and Niall Campbell.
In announcing the recipient of the prestigious annual prize, which recognises new collections published in the UK and Ireland, Hofmann said: “The poems of Wellwater come from the whole of an adventurously lived life. They hold the two sentiments ‘The world is a beautiful place / The world is a terrible place’, in perfect equipoise.
“They offer no happy endings, no salvation in past or future, in epiphany or private happiness. And yet they are anything but grim, with an ironic humour that plays over our increasingly euphemism-hungry culture.”
Wellwater reckons with themes of environmental destruction, with a perspective shaped by Solie’s upbringing in rural Saskatchewan – a province that has been particularly affected by Canada’s increasingly damaging wildfire season.
Writing in the Observer last April, Jade Cuttle described the book as a “blazingly honest catalogue of human-made hazard and harm”, which celebrates “the contemporary landscapes refusing to be tamed”.
Last year’s prize was awarded to the Michigan-born poet Peter Gizzi for his collection Fierce Elegy. Other recent winners include Joelle Taylor, Jason Allen-Paisant, Anthony Joseph and Bhanu Kapil.
