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TS Eliot Prize shortlist and Ashdown Forest poetry competition winners announced

We’ve got a lot to celebrate this National Poetry Day.

Earlier this week the shortlist for the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize was announced, and we’re thrilled to see three of our writers included:

• WritersMosaic contributor Raymond Antrobus, who was shortlisted for his latest collection Signs, Music. Raymond will be in conversation with WritersMosaic‘s Colin Grant at the Ilkley Literature Festival, this coming Sunday 6 October.
• RLF Grant Beneficiary Helen Farish, whose nominated work The Penny Dropping includes an acknowledgement of the support she received from the RLF. “The fact that I had the time to devote to the book is due to the RLF’s support,” Helen says. Find out more about our grants here.
• Karen McCarthy Woolf, another WritersMosaic contributor whose verse novel Top Doll was previously reviewed in WritersMosaic.

First presented in 1993, the T. S. Eliot Prize is one of poetry’s most prestigious awards. Previous winners include WritersMosaic contributor Jason Allen-Paisant – who won last year, in 2023 – as well as Ocean Vuong, Michael Longley, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Bhanu Kapil, Ted Hughes, Roger Robinson, Alice Oswald, Joelle Taylor, and John Burnside. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on Monday 13 January 2025.

More poetry news announced this week includes the result of Ashdown Forest’s inaugural poetry competition for teens and adults.

One of the largest open access areas in Southeast England, the woods of Ashdown Forest were forever immortalised by author and RLF Benefactor A. A. Milne, who used them as the basis for Winnie-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood. The competition asked poets to create work inspired by the woods, which are also home to many rare and threatened species.

RLF Fellow Sanjida O’Connell was part of the judging panel, helping to select two winners – Bethany Hilton, whose poem Pause won in the Teens category, and Kevin Scully, who won the Adult category with his elegiac poem The Family Tartan. You can read the winning entries in full here.

Picture shows shortlisted T.S. Eliot Prize nominees (l-r) Raymond Antrobus, Helen Farish, Karen McCarthy Woolf. Image of Raymond Antrobus by Suki Dhanda. Image of Helen Farish by Phyllis Christopher.

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