TS Eliot prize for poetry shortlist contains ‘a strong strain of elegy’ | Books

Raymond Antrobus, Carl Phillips and Karen McCarthy Woolf are among the poets shortlisted for the 2024 TS Eliot prize.

British-Nigerian poet Gboyega Odubanjo, who died last year aged 27 after going missing at Shambala music festival, has been shortlisted for his debut collection Adam.

The prize awards £25,000 to the author of the best new poetry collection published in the UK or Ireland. Shortlisted poets receive £1,500 each.

“Our shortlisted poets are wonderfully diverse in style, theme and idiom, embracing myth, pop culture, sport, faith, trans identity, AI – a gamut of present and past life,” said poet and judging chair Mimi Khalvati.

“Throughout these collections runs a strong strain of elegy, responding to our dark times with testaments of loss and grief,” she added. One such collection is Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, which in “its beautiful, fiery insistence … redeclares the elegy as the undying practice of the living”, wrote Oluwaseun Olayiwola in the Guardian.

Among the shortlisted poetry “there is also humour, intimacy, joy and energy,” said Khalvati. “Poems to make you well up, to inspire you to write, and most of all to invite you to read”.

British poet Antrobus made the shortlist for his fourth collection – Signs, Music – which is about fatherhood and masculinity. “Antrobus captures ordinary life with an episodic, unconstrained energy,” wrote Kit Fan in the Guardian.

McCarthy Woolf, who is of English and Jamaican heritage, was selected for her verse novel Top Doll, while American poet Phillips, who won the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 2023, was shortlisted for Scattered Snows, to the North, which Fan described as a “pitch-perfect” collection about love, death and memory.

Odubanjo’s posthumously published first collection takes as its starting point the September 2001 discovery of the remains of an unidentified Black child, “Adam”, in the River Thames. “The entire book is in part about what it is to be a missing person – and it seems an unprocessable tragedy to learn that Odubanjo himself at the end of his life went missing and was discovered to have accidentally drowned in a lake,” wrote Kate Kellaway in her Observer review.

Odubanjo’s body was found in a lake five days after he was last seen on 26 August 2023. In an inquest, his death was ruled as an accident. More than £80,000 has been raised through a fundraiser organised by his family and friends, part of which will help fund the Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation, aimed at supporting low-income Black writers.

Completing the shortlist are Lapwing by Hannah Copley, Eleanor Among the Saints by Rachel Mann, The Penny Dropping by Helen Farish, High Jump as Icarus Story by Gustav Parker Hibbett and Rhizodont by Katrina Porteous.

The 10 shortlisted poets will read from their work at an event at the Southbank Centre on 12 January, and the winner will be announced the following day.

Joining Khalvati on this year’s judging panel is Anthony Joseph, who won the prize in 2022, and Hannah Sullivan, who won in 2018. Other past winners include Don Paterson (twice), Ted Hughes, Anne Carson, Carol Ann Duffy, Derek Walcott and Ocean Vuong. In 2023, Jason Allen-Paisant won the prize for his 7, Self-Portrait As Othello.