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Peter Gizzi wins TS Eliot Prize with collection of 'transcendental beauty'
Peter Gizzi has won the 2024 TS Eliot Prize, awarded by the TS Eliot Foundation, with his collection of "transcendental beauty", Fierce Elegy (Penguin Poetry).
Gizzi will receive the winner’s prize of £25,000 and each shortlisted poet will receive £1,500. Judges Mimi Khalvati (chair), Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan chose the shortlist from 187 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers. The list comprised seasoned poets, two debuts, two second collections and two previously shortlisted poets from both long-established and independent presses.
Khalvati said: "We are delighted to welcome and honour a work that is infinitely sad yet resolute, and so fully alive in body and spirit. Written in the afterlife of grief, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy brings us poems that revel in minutiae but also brave the large questions in a lyric sequence of transcendental beauty."
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Gizzi was born in Alma, Michigan and is the author of 11 collections of poetry. His honours include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships in poetry from the Howard Foundation, the Rex Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has been a Judith E Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University twice, and has taught at Brown University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Program at Naropa and elsewhere.
Gizzi was announced as the winner on Monday, 13th January at the award ceremony held at the Wallace Collection, London. On Sunday, 12th January the shortlisted poets read at the Royal Festival Hall, London and an audio version of the readings will be available on the TS Eliot Prize YouTube channel shortly.
