We're thrilled to announce this year's Walcott Prize Short List! The prize is offered annually for a book of poetry by a non-US citizen published anywhere in the world. This year’s judge, Carolyn Forché, will announce the winner on October 13th, 2022. The shortlist features four Carcanet poets, which we're ecstatic about!

Simon Armitage, The Owl and the Nightingale, Faber & Faber

Sheri Benning, Field Requiem, Carcanet Press

Natalka Bilotserkivets, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, Translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, Lost Horse Press

Jenny Boychuk, Antonyms for Daughter, Véhicule Press/Signal Editions

Mark Callanan, Romantic, Biblioasis

James Caruth, Speechless at Inch, The Poetry Business

Najwan Darwish, Exhausted on the Cross, Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, NYRB

Saddiq Dzukogi, Your Crib, My Qibla, University of Nebraska Press

Lorna Goodison, Mother Muse, Carcanet Press

Victoria Kennefick, Eat Or We Both Starve, Carcanet Press

Erik Lindner, Words are the Worst, Translated by Francis R. Jones, Véhicule Press/Signal Editions

Carola Luther, On the Way to Jerusalem Farm, Carcanet Press

A huge congratulations to all four Carcanet poets! Find out more on the Arrowsmith Press website.

Carola Luther's new book On the Way to Jerusalem Farm explores the complexities of living in a damaged world. How, it asks, does such a world live in us, and we in it?

Field Requiem bears witness to the violence inherent in the shift to industrialised farming in prairie Canada. Sheri Benning's poems chart the ways in which a way of life collapses, the world of the family farm, even as the speaker suffers, too.

Mother Muse by Lorna Goodison zones in on two great under-regarded figures to whom Jamaican music owes a substantial debt: Sister Mary Ignatius and Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood.

Victoria Kennefick's daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces - the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire - but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past - and not to be consumed by it.