A posthumous collection by a young poet who was found dead after a festival last year is among the shortlisted books for this year’s £25,000 TS Eliot prize. Adam, which is Gboyega Odubanjo’s debut full collection, was published by Faber & Faber earlier this year. The 27-year-old British-Nigerian poet, who was born and raised in east London, also published three poetry pamphlets: While I Yet Live (Bad Betty Press, 2019); Two stops short of Barking (The Alternative School of Economics, 2021); and Aunty Uncle Poems (The Poetry Business / New Poets List, 2021). He was a winner of the Michael Marks award and an Eric Gregory award. The Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation for low-income Black writers was established in 2023 to honour his legacy.

Here is the full shortlist:

Raymond Antrobus, Signs, Music (Picador Poetry)
Hannah Copley, Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry / Liverpool University Press)
Helen Farish, The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe Books)  
Peter Gizzi, Fierce Elegy (Penguin Poetry)                      
Gustav Parker Hibbett, High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press)
Rachel Mann, Eleanor Among the Saints (Carcanet Press)
Gboyega Odubanjo, Adam (Faber & Faber)                   
Carl Phillips, Scattered Snows, to the North (Carcanet Press)
Katrina Porteous, Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books)
Karen McCarthy Woolf, Top Doll (Dialogue Books)      
 
The chair of the TS Eliot prize 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.”

You can read biographies of the shortlisted poets here

Shortlist picture shows top, left to right: Peter Gizzi (photo © Rick Myers); Karen McCarthy Woolf (photo © Yasmine Akim); Carl Phillips (photo © Reston Allen); Gboyega Odubanjo (photo © Asare Debrah); Katrina Porteous (photo © Tony Griffiths)
Bottom, left to right: Hannah Copley (photo © Nick Dennis); Gustav Parker Hibbett (photo © Abbie McNeice); Rachel Mann (photo © KTPhotography); Helen Farish (photo © Phyllis Christopher); Raymond Antrobus (photo © Chantal Lawrie)