Early on in her latest collection, the Canadian poet Karen Solie apologises: “I’m sorry, I can’t make this beautiful.” The line appears in a poem, Red Spring, about agribusiness and its sinister human impact: the world’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate, is “advertised as non-persistent; but tell that to Dewayne Johnson // and his non-Hodgkin lymphoma”. In 2018, a jury ruled that Monsanto’s glyphosate weedkiller, Roundup, caused the former groundskeeper’s cancer.

Solie’s admission – that real horror can’t be prettified – recalls Noor Hindi’s viral 2020 poem, Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying. We can’t “treat poetry like it’s some kind of separate thing” to what’s going on around us, says Solie, speaking to me in Soho, London, the morning after finding out she has won the TS Eliot prize for her collection Wellwater. “We all have to keep our eyes open”, but “that doesn’t mean we can’t say we’re scared, because it’s scary”.

The poet, 59, grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada, and is now based between Toronto and St Andrews, Scotland, where she teaches half-time at the university. She began writing poetry in her early 30s, publishing her first collection in 2001. Wellwater is her sixth collection, and was also the joint winner of the Forward prize last October.

Whether she is writing about agrochemical monopolies or housing insecurity or wildfires, Solie doesn’t once drop her gaze. While the question of art’s role in times of crisis is “a very old one”, the difference now “is that everything feels so accelerated”, Solie says. “There have been other times of crisis”, but now there is a “sense of things careening towards some kind of head”. We “have to feel like human beings with a spirit in order to do anything about anything”, but there are interests that “thrive on us being distracted and divided”. Art is “so crucial, because it counteracts that”.

Many of the poems in Wellwater centre on plants and animals. What quickly becomes clear is that Solie is fascinated by the creatures we take for granted, and, as she puts it, “things that are so ubiquitous as to disappear in one’s landscape”. There are poems about climbing vines, rats, “the mash” – a Newfoundland term for bogs. “They’re so common, and that interests me,” says Solie. “To look again at some of those things and to make them remarkable again.” Much of this transformation is a humanisation: grasses “pass teaspoons of silence” up a slope, sheep “find a nave // in which to say / their panicked rosaries”.

Solie believes her sympathy for nature’s overlooked species “might have something to do with where I’m from, which is a place that is very beautiful, but not in an overt way”. She grew up in a part of Saskatchewan where there are “no mountains” – “it’s mostly fields, crops, and it’s quite flat”, but still “very beautiful”.

As a child, Solie was a big reader. She attended a small rural school, with eight people in her class. “Its resources were not the best, but there were always books in the house – not poetry but novels and short stories.” Her father, to whom Wellwater is dedicated, and who died in 2024 before she completed the collection, owned a book called A World of Great Stories. “I read this many times as a kid, even though it contains some things that are not entirely appropriate for children, and that’s really where it started.”

Solie didn’t get into poetry until much later, at university in her mid-20s, after working as a reporter for several years. She studied at the University of Lethbridge, in Alberta, and took a contemporary poetry course in her third year. The feeling she had experienced with short stories – “the magic of reading a sentence, and it’s just a sentence, but it evokes this physical response” – she found with poetry too.

The “whole crowd” she encountered in that first class – WH Auden, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore – made a lasting impression. A writer who “cracked something open” for her later on was Tomas Tranströmer. Anne Carson has “always been important”. And the work of younger poets, including two shortlisted for this year’s TS Eliot, Isabelle Baafi and Catherine-Esther Cowie, has been “revitalising”.

Before Wellwater, Solie had published five collections: 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. She has for several years taught in the UK, at Manchester Metropolitan University before moving to St Andrews. The “financial cushion” that the TS Eliot prize brings will make it possible to focus on writing, says Solie. “And I’m going to be a very happy person when I pay off my credit card and see that zero balance, that’s going to be great.”

Winning the award – among the world’s most prestigious for poetry – is “incredibly encouraging”, she says. As a writer, “you spend a lot of time alone, and looking at the screen, and thinking of all of the ways that things could be better. There’s a lot of self-doubt – there has to be, in order to produce anything good.” So having the book recognised is “just lovely”.

Of her practice, Solie says that she is not someone who can “just write things out quickly”. “I’m a word-by-word person,” she says. “Things take me a lot of time, I’m very slow. So sometimes things evolve through many, many revisions.”

In Wellwater, slotted between poems about nature are others about urban spaces, malls and bad apartments. In the opening poem, Basement Suite, Solie tells us: “In the basement one is closer to God because / closer to consequence, to creatures no one loves / but the specialists”. In another, Toronto the Good, she writes of “The parade / of baffling flats we viewed, advertised as ‘funky,’ ‘quirky,’ // were tiny museums of illegality / we convinced ourselves weren’t bad.” “The backdrop to all this is how unaffordable Toronto has become,” says Solie. Many people “have been pushed into this succession of temporary accommodations”. It’s “infuriating to see the direction that so many cities have gone”, and difficult to see a realistic way back, she says.

Whether environmental or personal, there’s “a lot of loss in the book”, says Solie. “But I hope as well there’s some kind of gesture past all of that.” The penultimate poem, Starcraft, written after her father’s death, reaches for this, imagining “compartments of another world sliding past / this one. Or another dimension. I like that better. / … / … It would mean / you aren’t gone, just out of frame.”

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.

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.

This year’s TS Eliot prize for poetry has been awarded to Michigan-born Peter Gizzi for Fierce Elegy, a collection that draws on the poet’s experience of losing his brother.

Chair of judges, the British poet Mimi Khalvati, described Gizzi’s collection as “infinitely sad, yet resolute, and so alive in body and spirit”.

Fierce Elegy, which also won the Massachusetts book award in September, was chosen as winner of the £25,000 prize over nine other shortlisted collections, including Raymond Antrobus’s Signs, Music and Helen Farish’s The Penny Dropping.

Gizzi’s brother Michael was also a poet, and with him Gizzi founded the former US literary magazine oblék. Michael died in 2010, and Gizzi’s other brother, Tom, in 2018. Gizzi himself was diagnosed with a rare form of blood disease in 2021.

“Written in the aftermath of grief, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy brings us poems that revel in minutiae but also brave the large questions in a lyric sequence of transcendental beauty,” read a statement from the judging panel, which was made up of poets Khalvati, Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan.

Gizzi, the author of poetry collections including Now It’s Dark and National Book Award finalist Archeophonics, has long been interested in elegies. “The elegy allows me to explore the significant awareness of periodicity as a measure of the world, the periodicity of a life form, of one’s own life, of others,” he told the White Review in 2020. “It is a way to transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.”

In his Guardian review of Fierce Elegy, Oluwaseun Olayiwola praised the way “lyrics of resignation are juxtaposed with ecstatic lines that reimagine silence as ‘conversations with the dead’”, noting that the poet “redeclares the elegy as the undying practice of the living.”

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Alongside Gizzi, Antrobus and Farish on the shortlist were Hannah Copley, Gustav Parker Hibbett, Rachel Mann, Carl Phillips, Katrina Porteous, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Gboyega Odubanjo. All the shortlisted poets will receive £1,500. It is believed that the prize money awarded to Odubanjo, who died in August 2023 at the age of 27, will be donated to the Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation, set up after the poet’s death by his family in order to support low-income Black writers.

The TS Eliot prize is awarded annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland. Last year’s winner was Jason Allen-Paisant for his second collection, Self-Portrait As Othello.

Jamaican poet Jason Allen-Paisant has won this year’s TS Eliot prize for Self-Portrait As Othello, his collection exploring Black masculinity and immigrant identity.

Allen-Paisant was announced as the winner of the £25,000 award during a ceremony at the Wallace Collection in London.

“Self-Portrait As Othello is a book with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair,” said the judging panel, made up of the poets Paul Muldoon, Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul.

The book – Allen-Paisant’s second collection, published by Carcanet Press – won the Forward prize for best collection in October and has been shortlisted for the Writers’ prize, the award previously known as the Rathbones Folio prize. It was also named one of the Guardian’s best poetry books of 2023.

“As the title would suggest, the poetry is delivered with theatricality and in a range of voices and registers, across geographies and eras,” added the judges. “It takes real nerve to pull off a work like this with such style and integrity. We are confident that Self-Portrait as Othello is a book to which readers will return for many years.”

In Self-Portrait As Othello, Allen-Paisant draws a connection between Shakespeare’s Othello, a Moorish general who is often treated as an outsider in Venice, and the experiences of Black immigrants today. His poems move between Jamaica, Prague, Paris and Oxford among other places, and he weaves in lines of French, Jamaican patois, Italian and German.

The collection offers a “deep, generous interrogation of masculinity, and a linked elevation of the maternal that is at the heart of so many Caribbean and other families”, wrote Fiona Sampson in the Guardian. “Enriched by historical research, Self-Portrait As Othello celebrates representation, understanding and speech as acts of glorious resistance.”

Allen-Paisant is a senior lecturer in critical theory and creative writing at the University of Manchester. His first collection, Thinking With Trees, was published in 2021. His non-fiction book, Scanning the Bush, will be published in 2024. He lives in Leeds with his wife and two children.

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Other poets that made the 10-strong shortlist for this year’s prize include Kit Fan for The Ink Cloud Reader, Jane Clarke for A Change in the Air and Sharon Olds for Balladz.

The TS Eliot prize was established in 1993. Previous winners include Ted Hughes, Don Paterson, Carol Ann Duffy and Ocean Vuong. The 2022 winner was Anthony Joseph for his collection Sonnets for Albert.