Nick Makoha, Catherine-Esther Cowie, and Isabelle Baafi are on the T.S. Eliot Prize 2025 shortlist, announced on Monday, October 5, 2025.
The T. S. Eliot Prize is awarded annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland. Founded to celebrate the UK Poetry Book Society’s 40th birthday and honour its founding poet in 1993, previous winners include Derek Walcott, John Burnside, Sharon Olds, Sinéad Morrissey, David Harsent, Sarah Howe, Jacob Polley, Ocean Vuong, and Hannah Sullivan. Anthony Joseph and Jason Allen-Paisant have won the award in recent years.
The 2025 jury is comprised of poet, academic, and editor Michael Hofmann, poet and editor Niall Campbell, and poet, performer, mentor, and novelist Patience Agbabi. They announced the shortlist on Sunday, October 5.
Michael Hofmann said, “We read over 10,000 pages of poetry, Niall, Patience, and I, and are left with just ten titles on our shortlist. But those titles are of great range, suggestiveness and power; from Entebbe to Manitoba, from blocks of text to threads of voice, there is something here for everyone. And that’s the joy of poetry; while it exists things are never entirely hopeless.”
Among the shortlistees are the following poets of African descent;
- The New Carthaginians, Nick Makoha (Penguin Books)
- Heirloom, Catherine-Esther Cowie (Carcanet Press)
- Chaotic Good, Isabelle Baafi (Faber & Faber)
The winner of the 2025 Prize will be announced at the award ceremony on Monday, January 19, 2026. The shortlisted poets will each be presented with cheques for £1,500, and the winner will receive a cheque for £25,000 – the most valuable prize in British poetry.
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