Congratulations to Rachel Mann and Carl Phillips, whose collections Eleanor Among the Saints and Scattered Snows, to the North have been shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize!

The award is given annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland, and the 2024 shortlist was selected by Mimi Khalvati (Chair), Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan. We're thrilled to see two of our poets celebrated by the most prestigious poetry prize in the world, and the only major poetry prize judged purely by established poets.

Khalvati said of the shortlist:

'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. Throughout these collections runs a strong strain of elegy, responding to our dark times with testaments of loss and grief. There is also humour, intimacy, joy and energy – poems to make you well up, to inspire you to write, and most of all to invite you to read.'

The winning poet will receive a prize of £25,000, and the shortlisted poets will each win £1,500. The T.S. Eliot Prize 2024 shortlist readings will take place at the Southbank Centre on Sunday 12th January, before the winner is announced at an awards ceremony on Monday 13th January.

Congratulations to Rachel and Carl!

In her second collection, Mann wrestles with the questions and possibilities raised when trans identity, faith and the limits of myth and language intersect and are tested. Eleanor Among the Saints is a study in the queer joy found in counter-factuals and fantasy, shaped through the prism of the disputed story of Eleanor Rykener, a medieval trans woman, seamstress and sex worker.

Kym Deyn wrote of the collection; 'Mann writes into the gaps in Eleanor's history and record to come out with something more than the sum of its parts: gorgeous language, visceral, decadent and tender, full of Eleanor's imagined faces: saint and widow, lyric poet and wife; mercurial, shifting, but always defiant.... The body in Mann's work is as full of holiness as it is of queerness, of mess and filth and life, and it's this nuance, playful and inventive, grief-stricken and furious, that makes this collection one of the best of this year so far.'

Carl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowledge that's rooted in (always unstable) human memory. If the poet's recent books have been engaged with the theme of power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the value of embracing it and thus of releasing ourselves from the compulsion to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it really happen? If we believe it didn't, does that make our belief true? In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks through the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition – 'tears were tears', mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn't, the way people live until they don't. And there was also joy. And beauty. 'Yet the world's still so beautiful... Sometimes it is...' It was enough. And it still can be.

Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, Phillips's first UK publication, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His most recent prose book is My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). Phillips lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.