Katrina Porteous & Helen Farish shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024
Two titles published by Bloodaxe Books are on the ten-strong shortlist for the prestigious TS Eliot Prize. The prize is awarded annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland. The shortlist was announced on 1 October 2024, chosen from 187 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers.
The two Bloodaxe titles shortlisted are both fourth collections from poets based in the North of England: Rhizodont by Katrina Porteous, who has lived on the Northumberland coast since 1987, and The Penny Dropping by Helen Farish, who grew up in Cumbria and returned to live there in 2007. Their books were published by Bloodaxe Books in June and April 2024 respectively.
The Judges for the T S Eliot Prize 2024 are: Mimi Khalvati (Chair), Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan.
Chair of the judging panel Mimi Khalvati said:
'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 TS Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings will be held at London's Royal Festival Hall at 7pm on Sunday 12 January 2025. The event will be hosted by poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan and will be British Sign Language (BSL) interpreted. Booking details for in-person tickets are here (tickets from £12, concessions £25% off) and for the livestream here (tickets £7).
The winner will be announced at a ceremony at the Wallace Collection on the evening of Monday 13 January. The winning poet receives £25,000 and all shortlisted poets receive £1,500. The TS Eliot Prize is the only major poetry prize which is judged solely by established poets.
Full details of all the shortlisted books are on the T S Eliot Prize website here.
Specially commissioned videos of interviews with and readings by the shortlisted poets will be posted on the T S Eliot Prize YouTube channel here.
All ten shortlisted books will be reviewed by John Field, with reviews posted on the TS Eliot Prize website and featured in weekly e-newsletters along with Readers' Notes and a series of Writers' Notes from the shortlisted poets. Sign up for the weekly e-newsletters here.
Video reviews of all the shortlisted titles by Young Critics will also be posted on YouTube later in the year.
Katrina Porteous was featured in Cultured. North East following her shortlisting for the TS Eliot Prize. Available online here.
Last year’s winner was Jason Allen-Paisant for his collection Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet Press); the judges were Paul Muldoon (Chair), Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul. Two Bloodaxe titles were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2023: Irish poet Jane Clarke's third full collection A Change in the Air, and Abigail Parry's second collection I Think We're Alone Now.
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For further information about Rhizodont or The Penny Dropping, please email Christine Macgregor at publicity@bloodaxebooks.com.
For interviews and review copies in connection with the TS Eliot Prize, please contact Gina Rozner: ginarozner@icloud.com, tel 07887 811806
or Michael Sims: michael.sims@tseliotprize.com, tel 07940 221825
To download author photographs and jacket illustrations, please see here.
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The Penny Dropping is a book-length verse sequence by Helen Farish. It charts the course of a cherished relationship from first meeting to eventual break-up and beyond.
Bernard O’Donoghue writes, ‘it has all the coherence of a novel; but there is so much more to this beautifully realised lyric collection of the kind that she is a recognised master of. It is a masterpiece in both forms to a very unusual degree.'
'This themed book reflects upon a past love affair, taking us from inception to end, and what comes next. There is regret, rueful anger, a sense of loss and longing, together with a genuine feeling of tender gratitude for having experienced so intense a relationship in all its moods. What is fascinating is that these poems show such energy and luminosity from emotions first felt over 30 years ago [...] A remarkable collection from an excellent poet.' – David Harmer, Orbis, on The Penny Dropping
Helen Farish is the author of four books of poems, Intimates (Cape, 2005), Nocturnes at Nohant: The Decade of Chopin and Sand (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), The Dog of Memory (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) and The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe Books, 2024). Intimates, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. The Dog of Memory was shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017. Helen Farish was also a Writer of the Year Finalist in the Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017. Her PhD thesis explored the work of Louise Glück and Sharon Olds. She has taught at Sheffield Hallam University and Lancaster University, and now lives in Cumbria.
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Katrina Porteous's fourth poetry collection, Rhizodont, was published by Bloodaxe in June 2024. Rhizodont takes its name from the three-metre-long fossil fish found on the Northumberland coast in 2007, and moves from familiar places along the North-East coast to global questions of evolution, survival and extinction – in communities and languages, and in the natural world.
Rhizodont follows Katrina Porteous's third collection Edge (2019), which gathered together poems from her scientific collaborations. Her two earlier collections, The Lost Music (1996) and Two Countries (2014), were concerned with the landscapes and communities of North-East England. Two Countries was shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature in 2015. All four collections are published by Bloodaxe Books.
'Rhizodont does for the mining and fishing communities of post-Thatcher Northumberland what Heaney did for mid century Mid-Ulster, archiving the vast richness of its language, culture and work-lives. Porteous’ painterly eye for detail gives depth and resonance to the histories and dramas of her human and non-human subjects alike.' – Dave Coates, Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 2024 (Summer Reading)
Poet and historian Katrina Porteous was born in Aberdeen and lived there until she was seven years old, after which she moved to County Durham, where her mother's family were from. She has lived on the Northumberland coast since 1987. She was presented with a Cholmondeley Award in June 2021, an award which recognises the achievement and distinction of individual poets.
The BBC Radio 4 feature The Susurrations of the Sea, broadcast on 15 December 2022, features a series of poems responding to the sounds of the sea by Katrina Porteous now published in her fourth collection Rhizodont (on pages 13, 14, 53, 96-7 and 112). The programme was one of her many collaborations with BBC radio producer Julian May.
'Katrina writes a new sequence of poems in response to the sounds of the sea and these run through the programme like breaking waves, a choppy sea and an ocean swell.'
Listen via BBC Sounds here.
[01 October 2024]
