Peter Gizzi has won the 2024 TS Eliot Prize, awarded by the TS Eliot Foundation, with his collection of "transcendental beauty", Fierce Elegy.

The T. S. Eliot Prize, which former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion has described as “the Prize poets most want to win”, is an annual prize for the best new poetry collection published in the UK or Ireland.

This powerful new collection from legendary American poet Gizzi, reckoning with the transformative power of elegy through poems of lament and love

It has been widely lauded:

'I am awestruck, dumbfounded … a masterwork' Ocean Vuong

'Transcendent ... He identifies the thing we're all searching for' The New Yorker

In Fierce Elegy, Gizzi contends with a decade of grief, and learns to transform a broken heart into new strength. These are poems of loss; of love; of the strangeness of being a self amid the fury of the world; and of our ongoing closeness with the dead. They are soaring yet grounded, vulnerable and brave. Ears attuned, grip assured. Mind free.

Gizzi will receive the winner’s prize of £25,000 and each shortlisted poet will receive £1,500. Judges Mimi Khalvati, 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."

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.  

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Photo Credit: Pete Woodhead