‘Transcendental beauty’ of Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy wins him TS Eliot poetry prize

Peter Gizzi reading from his collection Fierce Elegy at the Southbank Centre, London. Photograph: Pete Woodhead/TS Eliot prize

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”.