Last modified on Sun 24 Jan 2021 15.40 EST
Bhanu Kapil has won the most valuable award in British poetry, the TS Eliot prize, for her “radical and arresting” collection How to Wash a Heart, in which she depicts the uncomfortable dynamics between an immigrant and her white, middle-class host.
In the collection, Kapil’s immigrant guest addresses her liberal host, exploring how “it’s exhausting to be a guest / In somebody else’s house / Forever”. It beat works by poets including JO Morgan and Natalie Diaz to the £25,000 prize, which counts among its former winners Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy and Seamus Heaney.
Top 10: the TS Eliot Prize shortlist
Each year, the T S Eliot Prize offers poets a chance to win a huge sack of cash, and critics a chance to generalise about trends in poetry. So here goes: long fragmentary narratives are in, love poems are out (though Natalie Diaz unfashionably flies the flag for sensual abandon). Who’ll win the £25,000 prize? If I were judging, it’d be Sasha Dugdale or Shane McCrae. But I’m not, so I’d bet on Diaz, with a side-flutter on Bhanu Kapil.
I’m sore about the omission of Timothy Donnelly’s superb The Problem of the Many, and wouldn’t have minded a bit of light relief (Caroline Bird, say, or Matthew Welton) but otherwise this is a strong and unusually ambitious list. Like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, half the nominees are university dons, but this year the books
With extensive coronavirus mitigation measures in place in London, the TS Eliot Prize’s events set for Royal Festival Hall now will be streamed.
Shortlisted poets in the 2020 TS Eliot Prize program are, top row from left, Natalie Diaz, Sasha Dugdale, Ella Frears, Will Harris, and Wayne Holloway-Smith. On the second row from left, Bhanu Kapil, Daisy Lafarge, Glyn Maxwell, Shane McCrae, and J O Morgan
Greenlaw: ‘Resilient, Potent, Capricious, Universal’
Organizers of the United Kingdom’s TS Eliot Prize had planned to hold its shortlisted poets’ readings at London’s Royal Festival Hall on January 10 and an awards ceremony on the 11th.
REGARDING the recent letter about who is running the cleansing department, I don’t believe anyone is running it. I would have thought cleansing was essential work and therefore Covid should not be used as an excuse for not carrying out this essential work. Only recently it was reported there is a growth in the number of rats in our city. The litter on the pavements and in the gutters outside my home and all along Dumbarton Road in Whiteinch is a disgrace, and after promises of return phone calls from authorities that never came, I have come to the conclusion that there is nobody running the cleansing.
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka (Bloomsbury)
The Nobel laureate’s first novel in almost 50 years promises “murder, mayhem and no shortage of drama” in contemporary Nigeria.
The Thursday Murder Club 2 by Richard Osman (Viking)
Last year the
Pointless co-host’s cosy crime debut set in a retirement home broke sales records; here comes the sequel.
Waters of Salvation by Richard Coles (W&N)
A new crime series from everyone’s favourite vicar begins as a proposal to refurbish a village church ends in murder; Canon Daniel Clement must investigate.
Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout (Viking)