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The 10-book shortlist for this year's £25,000 T S Eliot Prize for poetry has been revealed, ranging across nine publishers and featuring two picks from Granta.
Granta Poetry's two titles are Rendang by Will Harris and Daisy Lafarge's Life Without Air, which join a list featuring Bhanu Kapil's How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry), Glyn Maxwell's How The Hell are You (Picador Poetry) and Shane McCrae's Sometimes I Never Suffered (Corsair Poetry).
The selections also include Natalie Diaz's Postcolonial Love Poem (Faber), Sasha Dugdale's Deformations (Carcanet), Shine, Darling by Ella Frears (Offord Road Books), Wayne Holloway Smith's Love Minus Love (Bloodaxe Books) and J O Morgan's The Martian’s Regress (Cape Poetry).
Chair of judges Lavinia Greenlaw, alongside Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan, chose the titles from 153 collections submitted by British and Irish publishers.
Greenlaw said: “My fellow judges, Mona Arshi, Andrew McMillan and I have been reading books written in a different world, the one before Covid-19. The urgency and vitality of the 10 books on this shortlist commanded our attention nonetheless. We were unsettled, captivated and compelled. Poetry is the most resilient, potent, capacious and universal art we have.”
An announcement will come at a later date about the shortlist readings and award ceremony.
The award is run by the T S Eliot Foundation and is the most valuable prize in British poetry with the winner getting a cheque for £25,000 and the shortlisted poets getting £1,500. It is the only major poetry prize which is judged purely by established poets.
Last year’s winner was Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree).