Karen Solie's Wellwater wins TS Eliot poetry prize

"The Canadian poet Karen Solie has won the 2025 TS Eliot poetry prize for a collection of work, Wellwater, which explores the destruction of the natural world. Solie was announced as the winner at a ceremony held at the Wallace Collection on Monday evening, and will receive 25,000 in prize money from the TS Eliot Foundation. Wellwater, her sixth collection, co-won the Forward prize for best collection last October, alongside Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidya."

"The poems of Wellwater come from the whole of an adventurously lived life. They hold the two sentiments The world is a beautiful place / The world is a terrible place', in perfect equipoise. They offer no happy endings, no salvation in past or future, in epiphany or private happiness. And yet they are anything but grim, with an ironic humour that plays over our increasingly euphemism-hungry culture."

Karen Solie won the 2025 TS Eliot poetry prize for Wellwater and will receive 25,000 in prize money from the TS Eliot Foundation. The award was announced at a ceremony held at the Wallace Collection. Wellwater is Solie's sixth collection and co-won the Forward prize for best collection last October alongside Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidya. The collection explores environmental destruction and reckons with human-made hazard and harm. The poems are shaped by Solie's upbringing in rural Saskatchewan, a province particularly affected by Canada's increasingly damaging wildfire season. Solie teaches half-time at the University of St Andrews and lives in Canada for the rest of the year. The TS Eliot shortlist included Tom Paulin, Isabelle Baafi, Nick Makoha and Sarah Howe, and the judging panel comprised Michael Hofmann, Patience Agbabi and Niall Campbell.

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