Reading List · Poetry
The T. S. Eliot Prize is awarded each year for the best new collection of poetry written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. It was inaugurated in 1993 to celebrate the Poetry Book Society’s 40th birthday and to honour its founding poet, T. S. Eliot, and has been run by the T. S. Eliot Foundation since 2016. The winner receives £25,000 and each shortlisted poet £1,500. Anne Carson, the first woman to win, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2026.
By Lisanne Swart · 33 winners since 1993 · Poetry · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 28 October 2026
Click a title to read about it further down ↓
Karen Solie won the 2025 prize with Wellwater, announced at the Wallace Collection, London, on 19 January 2026. The ten-book 2026 shortlist, judged by Leontia Flynn (chair), Ishion Hutchinson and Daisy Lafarge, was announced on 5 October 2026; the winner will be named on 18 January 2027.
Quick answer
The T. S. Eliot Prize is the UK and Ireland’s annual award for the best new poetry collection in English, run by the T. S. Eliot Foundation and worth £25,000 to the winner. The latest winner is Karen Solie’s Wellwater (2025 prize, announced January 2026).
How this page chooses
The timeline at the top lists every winner, all 33 of them. The latest fifteen have their own entry further down, oldest first; the titles in the timeline that you can click are those.
Under each book is a line of plain fact about the book or its author, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first. The line in red is a fact about the book or its author, not an opinion about it.
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A collection published by Cape Poetry that the prize’s chair, Gillian Clarke, described as “powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness”. The judges called it “a haunting book of great beauty”.
It also won the 2011 Forward Prize for Best Collection.
A sequence of poems about the end of Sharon Olds’s 30-year marriage, which the publisher describes as telling “the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom”.
It also won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Poems about what is caught and what is lost when people, houses and cityscapes are fixed in time by photography, from Alexander Robert Hogg’s pictures of Belfast slums to figures erased from Soviet photographs under Stalin.
It is Morrissey’s fifth collection; she was Belfast’s inaugural poet laureate.
A collection built around four “Fire” sequences dealing with martyrdom, war, the loss of love and environmental apocalypse, with recurring motifs of rats, tinnitus and the burning of written works.
It is Harsent’s 11th collection; his earlier Legion won the Forward Prize.
A debut collection that questions how the world is sorted and named, opening with Borges’s “Celestial Emporium” and ranging across Chinese history, Chinese characters, protest and censorship. Howe was born in Hong Kong to an English father and a Chinese mother.
Howe’s pamphlet A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia won an Eric Gregory Award.
Poems that follow the quasi-mythic figure of Jackself through a childhood spent outdoors on Lamanby farm, drawing on nursery rhyme, folktale and “Tom o’Bedlam”, and tracing education, friendship and loss in rhyming couplets and shifting imagery.
Polley’s earlier collections The Brink and The Havocs were both shortlisted for the same prize.
A debut collection that considers violence and the legacy of trauma left by the Vietnam War, moving between Vietnam and America and returning repeatedly to fathers and sons, from an opening poem titled “Telemachus” to “Aubade with Burning City”.
It also won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Thom Gunn Award.
A debut made up of three linked long poems: a sequence on being young in New York, a meditation on time that reaches the first nuclear detonation, and a final sequence following a pregnant woman preparing for birth.
It also won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize.
Robinson’s second full collection opens with poems on the Grenfell Tower disaster and the economic systems behind it, reckons with the legacy of slavery, and moves on to a neonatal ward and the poet’s family history.
The judges, John Burnside, Sarah Howe and Nick Makoha, chose it unanimously.
Short poems addressed by a guest to a host, exploring the uneven power between them, the domestic microaggressions an immigrant endures and the slow convalescence of what the book treats as the injured immigrant heart.
The book grew out of Kapil’s 2019 show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
A collection about the lives of women in the butch counterculture, mourning lost queer spaces such as London’s Old Compton Street, with a central sequence structured as boxing rounds and a closing eulogy for murdered lesbian women.
It is Taylor’s fourth poetry collection.
Loosened sonnets about the poet’s absent father and the memories used to reconstruct him, opening with the father’s funeral and ending at his grave, with rhythms drawn from calypso and photographs set among the poems.
Joseph, born in Trinidad, is also a novelist, academic and musician.
A three-part collection that begins with a son’s long wait for an absent father in Jamaica and moves through Venice and Oxford, using fragments of Shakespeare’s Othello to examine race, identity and language.
It is Allen-Paisant’s second collection, after Thinking with Trees.
Spare, elliptical poems about grief, death and the relationship between the self and the natural world, which reimagine older texts including the Middle English Sir Orfeo and the Gospel of Matthew.
Gizzi’s earlier collection Archeophonics was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Solie’s sixth collection writes about environmental damage and extraction, from cleared trees and fracked shale to polluted water, and includes poems spoken by a group of survivors, with allusions to Ecclesiastes, Ted Hughes and H. G. Wells.
It also won the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry and shared the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
The prize was inaugurated in 1993 to mark the Poetry Book Society’s 40th birthday and to honour T. S. Eliot, the society’s founding poet. Eliot’s widow, Valerie Eliot, donated the prize money from the start; it is now provided by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
The Poetry Book Society ran the prize for many years until the T. S. Eliot Foundation took it over in 2016, when the society’s charity was wound up. The winner’s prize was raised to £25,000 for the 25th-anniversary prize in 2017; in 2013 it stood at £15,000.
Publishers in the UK and Ireland submit new collections in the summer, and a panel of three established poets chooses a shortlist of ten in October; for the 2025 prize the judges considered 177 collections from 64 publishers. Each shortlisted poet receives £1,500.
The shortlisted poets read at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, on the evening before the winner is announced in January. In 2011 the shortlisted poets John Kinsella and Alice Oswald withdrew their books in protest at the prize’s new sponsor.
It is an annual prize for the best new collection of poetry in English first published in the UK or Ireland, run by the T. S. Eliot Foundation and worth £25,000 to the winner.
Karen Solie won with Wellwater (Picador Poetry); the result was announced on 19 January 2026.
The 2026 winner will be announced at the Wallace Collection in London on 18 January 2027, the day after the shortlist readings at the Royal Festival Hall.
Jorie Graham, Keith Jarrett, Imani Mason Jordan, Sylvia Legris, Shara McCallum, Kim Moore, Andrew Motion, Holly Pester, Billy Ramsell and Jana Prikryl.
The winner receives £25,000 and each of the ten shortlisted poets receives £1,500.
Yes. Don Paterson won in 1997 with God’s Gift to Women and in 2003 with Landing Light.
Anne Carson, in 2001, with The Beauty of the Husband. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2026.
The T. S. Eliot Foundation, which took over from the Poetry Book Society in 2016.
Winner list last verified 28 October 2026.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
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