The 2023 TS Eliot prize shortlist has been announced, and it includes a former winner and two previously shortlisted poets, and poets from the UK, Ireland, Jamaica, Hong Kong and the US: Jason Allen-Paisant, Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet); Joe Carrick-Varty, More Sky (Carcanet;) Jane Clarke, A Change in the Air (Bloodaxe); Kit Fan, The Ink Cloud Reader (Carcanet); Katie Farris, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Pavilion Poetry / Liverpool University Press); Ishion Hutchinson, School of Instructions (Faber & Faber); Fran Lock, Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press); Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, The Map of the World (Gallery Press); Sharon Olds, Balladz (Cape Poetry); Abigail Parry, I Think We’re Alone Now (Bloodaxe)

On behalf of the judges Paul Muldoon said: “We are confident that all 10 shortlisted titles not only meet the high standards they set themselves but speak most effectively to, and of, their moment. If there’s a single word for that moment it is surely ‘disrupted’, and all these poets properly reflect that disruption. Shot through though they are with images of grief, migration, and conflict, they are nonetheless imbued with energy and joy. The names of some poets will be familiar, others less so; all will find a place in your head and heart.”

Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and academic who works as a senior lecturer in critical theory and creative writing at the University of Manchester. He’s the author of two poetry collections, Thinking with Trees (Carcanet Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry, and Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet Press, 2023). His non-fiction book, Scanning the Bush, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2024.

Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-Irish poet, writer and founding editor of bath magg. He is the author of two pamphlets of poetry: Somewhere Far (The Poetry Business, 2019) and 54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father (Out-Spoken Press, 2020). His work has appeared in the New Statesman, Poetry Review and Poetry London. He won an Eric Gregory award in 2022. More Sky (Carcanet, 2023) is his debut collection.

Jane Clarke’s first collection, The River (Bloodaxe, 2015), was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. Her second collection, When the Tree Falls (Bloodaxe, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2020 Pigott Poetry prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now award and the Farmgate Café National Poetry award 2020, and was longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize 2020. Her third collection, A Change in the Air (Bloodaxe, 2023) was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023 and is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. Jane received the Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel award 2022, enabling her to undertake a collaborative writing project with James Rebanks on his fell farm in the Lake District, Cumbria. Jane holds a BA in English and Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin and an MPhil in Writing from the University of South Wales. She lives with her wife in Glenmalure, Co Wicklow, where she combines writing with her work as a creative writing tutor and group facilitator.

Kit Fan is a poet, novelist and critic born and educated in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at the age of21. His first poetry collection, Paper Scissors Stone (HKUP, 2011), won the Hong Kong University International Poetry prize. As Slow as Possible (Arc, 2018) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and one of the Irish Times Books of the Year. He was shortlisted twice for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize. He won the Northern Writers Awards for Fiction and for Poetry, the Times Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize, and Poetry Magazine Editors’ Prize for Reviewing. His debut novel is Diamond Hill (Dialogue, 2021). The Ink Cloud Reader, his third poetry collection, is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.

Katie Farris’s recent work appears in Granta, Poetry, and the New York Times. She is the author of the chapbook, A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won the 2020 Chad Walsh Poetry award, and boysgirls, a hybrid-form book. She is also the co-translator of many works from Ukraine, including The Country Where Everyone’s Name is Fear (Lost Horse Press, 2023), one of World Literature Today’s Notable Books of 2022. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Pavilion Poetry / Liverpool University Press, 2023) is her debut collection.

lshion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections House of Lords and Commons (Faber & Faber, 2018), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and Far District (Faber & Faber, 2021), winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, among other honours. Hutchinson is a professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University.

Fran Lock is the former Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-2023), and the author of 12 poetry collections. She is a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review. Lock is an associate editor at the arts and culture cooperative, Culture Matters. She lives with Manny, her beloved pit bull and eternal muse.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork City in 1942 and educated there and at Oxford before spending her working life as an academic in Trinity College, Dublin. Her numerous awards include the Patrick Kavanagh award, the Irish Times award for poetry, the International Griffin poetry prize and the 1573 International Poetry Award, one of China’s highest literary honours. Her collections, published by the Gallery Press, include Acts and Monuments (1972, winner of the 1973 Patrick Kavanagh award, Site of Ambush (1975), The Rose Geranium (1981), The Magdalene Sermon (1989), The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001), Selected Poems (2008), The Sun-fish (2009, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2009 and winner of the 2010 Griffin International Poetry Prize), and The Mother House (2019, winner of the 2020 Irish Times Poetry Now award). Her Collected Poems (2020) won the Pigott prize in 2021. Ní Chuilleanáin is a Fellow and Professor of English (Emerita) at Trinity College, Dublin.  She served as Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2016-19.

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the author of 13 books of poetry. Balladz (Cape Poetry, 2023), was a finalist for the National Book award and was longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her collection, Stag’s Leap (Cape Poetry), won both the TS Eliot Prize 2012 and the Pulitzer prize. Olds holds the Erich Maria Remarque chair at New York University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, where she helped to found workshop programs for residents of Coler-Goldwater Hospital, and for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Abigail Parry spent several years as a toymaker before completing a PhD on wordplay. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish, Serbian and Japanese, and performed or exhibited in Europe, the Caribbean and the US. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work, including the Ballymaloe prize and an Eric Gregory award. Her first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe, 2018), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection, and named a Book of the Year in the New Statesman, the Telegraph and the Morning Star. I Think We’re Alone Now, her second collection, is published by Bloodaxe in November 2023. She lives in Cardiff.

The £25,000 TS Eliot prize, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, is awarded annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland, and is the most valuable in British poetry. The shortlist readings will take place on Sunday 14 January 2024 at 7pm in the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, and will be hosted by Ian McMillan. Tickets for the readings (which are British Sign Language interpreted) and the simultaneously streamed event are now on sale from the Southbank Centre box office. Booking details will be announced shortly. The winner of the 2023 prize will be announced at the prize ceremony on Monday 15 January 2024.