T.S. Eliot Finalists Announced: Capildeo, Riley, O’Donoghue, & More

The T.S. Eliot Prize, one of the U.K.'s most abundant poetry honors, has been "on the scene" since 1993, given to such luminaries as Alice Oswald, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Carol Ann Duffy along the way. This year, the finalists hail from a variety of lived experiences and locales; they include: Rachael Boast, Vahni Capildeo, Ian Duhig, JO Morgan, Bernard O’Donoghue, Alice Oswald, Jacob Polley, Denise Riley, Ruby Robinson, and Katharine Towers. From the Guardian:

After landing the £15,000 Forward prize for best collection in September, the Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo is in the running for the UK’s richest award for poetry, the £20,000 TS Eliot award.

Measures of Expatriation, which explores identity and the alienation of the expatriate, is one of 10 collections in the running for the prize. It is up against collections from Alice Oswald, Ian Duhig and Denise Riley, all of which also appeared on the Forward shortlist. Oswald’s Falling Awake examines mutability; Duhig’s The Blind Road draws from both Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the life of the 18th-century polymath Blind Jack Metcalf; and Riley’s Say Something Back revolves around her late son and includes her long poem about grieving and loss, A Part Song.

Publishers submitted 138 books for the prize. Judges and poets Ruth Padel, Julia Copus and Alan Gillis narrowed them down to a final 10, which also includes Scottish poet JO Morgan, chosen for Interference Pattern, a collection described as a “bracing, original, disruptive book” in the Guardian. Rachael Boast makes the TS Eliot shortlist for Void Studies, the realisation of a project proposed by Rimbaud; Bernard O’Donoghue for The Seasons of Cullen Church, about his childhood in Co Cork; and Katharine Towers for her second collection, The Remedies.

Read more at the Guardian.