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 are pm 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 are posted on YouTube here. Scroll down to see excellent video reviews of both books.
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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Katrina Porteous and Helen Farish were both invited to contribute pieces to the Poetry School’s TS Eliot Prize Writers’ Notes series. In her piece, which went online on 2 December 2024, Katrina focused on her fourth collection Rhizodont. Read online here. Helen Farish's piece went online on 10 December and can be read here.
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Katrina Porteous was the Poet in Focus in the TS Eliot Prize e-newsletter on 12 December, which featured Readers' Notes and John Field’s excellent review of Rhizodont, along with four videos of Katrina reading from and talking about her work. Read John Field's full review here. Read the newsletter here.
'Rhizodont, Porteous's fourth collection, is a hymn to the Earth, a love letter to the North East. The dialect of Northumberland washes it in a tide of language and, across these shifting sands of words, we step out of time and survey the planet from a geological perspective. The rhizodont of the title, a fossil fish which became extinct 310 million years ago, recalibrates our sense of time and reminds us that the Earth's cycles of erosion, extinction and creation transcend us. The result is a thrilling meeting of ideas and language as Porteous blurs the boundary between man and machine, between planet and technology.' – John Field, TS Eliot Prize reviewer
Katrina Porteous talks about her work
Katrina Porteous reads 'Coastal Erosion' from Rhizodont
TS Eliot Prize Young Critic Video series, online 16 December 2024
Young Critic Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha reviews Katrina Porteous’s fourth collection Rhizodont as part of the TS Eliot Prize Young Critic series of video reviews of the ten titles shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024.
‘In this collection, images of water and the coastline render tangible the epic making and re-making of the planet, the temporary nature of its creatures and geological features. […] In surreal and urgent ways, Rhizodont imagines the palimpsest of geological history that each landscape holds, unearthing its layers, imparting a sense of wonder at nature’s capacity for reinvention.’ – Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha, TS Eliot Prize Young Critic
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Helen Farish was the subject of the TS Eliot Prize e-newsletter of 31 October 2024. With links to an excellent review by John Field, to Readers’ Notes and to videos of Helen reading from and talking about her shortlisted collection The Penny Dropping. Read the full newsletter here.
‘Memory is fragile. As we cultivate and reinforce it, we create a myth which interacts with the details of daily life, transforming it into one huge shrine. The candour and courage of The Penny Dropping should not be underestimated. This is confessional poetry of the highest order.’ – John Field, TS Eliot Prize reviewer. Read the full review here.
The TS Eliot Prize Readers’ Notes feature the poems ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘That Route’ and ‘The Waste Land’, along with suggested discussion points. Downloadable PDF here.
Helen Farish was filmed reading her poems ‘The Penny Dropping’, ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Snow on the Road to Naoussa’. In a separate video she talks about her collection The Penny Dropping.
Helen reads the title poem from her shortlisted collection 'The Penny Dropping'
Helen Farish talks about her work
Watch all the videos here.
TS ELIOT PRIZE YOUNG CRITIC VIDEO REVIEWS
TS Eliot Prize Young Critics video review, online 9 December 2024
Sylvie Jane Lewis reviews Helen Farish's The Penny Dropping. An excellent and thoughtful in-depth review by Poetry Society and TS Eliot Prize Young Critic Sylvie Jane Lewis.
‘In speaking to the ghost of love through the language of immediacy, Farish resurrects the past for a moment, then lets it go.’ – Sylvie Jane Lewis, TS Eliot Prize Young Critic
A video review of Katrina Porteous's Rhizodont will be posted online in the coming weeks.
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Katrina Porteous was featured in Cultured. North East following her shortlisting for the TS Eliot Prize. Available online 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]
