Five debut collections are among the shortlist for this year’s TS Eliot prize for best new poetry collection, which saw a record number of submissions.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Mark Pajak, James Conor Patterson, Denise Saul and Yomi Sode all make the list for the £25,000 prize.
They are joined by Philip Gross, who won the prize in 2009, Fiona Benson, Jemma Borg, Anthony Joseph and Zaffar Kunial.
Chair of judges Jean Sprackland said the shortlist consisted of books that “thrilled, surprised, and struck us to the heart”.
Sprackland, who was joined on the judging panel by 2021 Costa winner Hannah Lowe and 2019 TS Eliot prize winner Roger Robinson, said the record-breaking number of entries for this year’s prize – 201 – was a “reminder that far from being silenced by crisis poets rise to meet it through language”.
Adukwei Bulley, whose collection Quiet earned her a place on the list, is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets and recipient of an Eric Gregory award. Rishi Dastidar in the Guardian said Quiet “marks the arrival of a major poetic talent”.
Benson, chosen by this year’s judges for Ephemeron, has been twice shortlisted for the prize previously: for her collections Bright Travellers and Vertigo & Ghost. Reviewing Ephemeron in the Guardian, Fiona Sampson said the book highlights the poet’s “unusual range”.
Borg, shortlisted for her second collection Wilder, was a zoologist and evolutionary geneticist and worked in science publishing before becoming a full-time writer. The poems in Wilder “call on us to remember ourselves as the animals we are”, according to its publisher Liverpool University Press.
Gross is shortlisted for his 27th collection, The Thirteenth Angel, which questions the existence of angels and what it is to be human. He won the TS Eliot prize in 2009 for his collection The Water Table.
Joseph is the author of five poetry collections and three novels, and has also released eight albums as a musician. He was the Colm Tóibín Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool in 2018 and was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. He is shortlisted for Sonnets for Albert, an autobiographical collection that weighs the impact of growing up with a largely absent father.
Kunial, who was a judge for the prize last year, is shortlisted for his second collection England’s Green. Reviewing the collection, Rishi Dastidar said that Kunial’s “ability to convey moments of sheer loveliness remains unmatched; his style is simple, declarative, elegant”.
Pajak is shortlisted for his debut collection Slide, which Kate Kellaway in the Observer said has “no rough moments or threadbare patches – its polished craftsmanship throughout is striking”.
Patterson is shortlisted for his debut collection bandit country, which won an Eric Gregory award in 2019. He is also the editor of the anthology The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border.
Saul, shortlisted for her debut collection The Room Between Us, is best known for her award-winning video-poem collaborative project, Silent Room: A Journey of Language. The Room Between Us tells the story of a mother’s illness and a daughter who takes on the role of carer.
Sode, whose collection Manorism has been shortlisted, is a playwright as well as a poet, whose play And breathe… premiered at the Almeida theatre in London last year.
Sprackland said of the shortlist: “The 10 shortlisted books are unflinching in their explorations of love and grief, brutality and desire. They are alive with insects and angels, psychedelic plants and deep-sea fish; and haunted by the ghosts of Caravaggio and Daniel O’Connell. The English of these books is supple and shapeshifting, inflected with Yoruba, Newry street dialect and the rhythms of Caribbean speech.”
The winner of the prize will be announced on 16 January. Last year’s winner was Joelle Taylor for her collection C+nto & Othered Poems.
