Canadian poet Karen Solie has been named the winner of the prestigious 2025 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry for her powerful collection, Wellwater. The announcement was made at a ceremony held at London's Wallace Collection.
A Prestigious Win and a Significant Prize
Solie will receive £25,000 in prize money from the TS Eliot Foundation. This marks her first outright win of the TS Eliot Prize, having been previously nominated in 2019 for The Caiplie Caves. Wellwater is Solie's sixth published collection and had already shared the Forward Prize for Best Collection in October 2024 with Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidyā.
Themes and Critical Acclaim
The winning collection, Wellwater, grapples profoundly with environmental destruction and humanity's impact on the natural world. The poet's perspective is shaped by her upbringing in rural Saskatchewan, a Canadian province increasingly ravaged by severe wildfire seasons.
The judging panel, comprising poets Michael Hofmann, Patience Agbabi, and Niall Campbell, selected Solie's work from a shortlist that included Tom Paulin, Isabelle Baafi, Nick Makoha, and Sarah Howe. In his announcement, chair judge Michael Hofmann praised the collection's balanced and unsentimental power.
"The poems of Wellwater come from the whole of an adventurously lived life," Hofmann stated. "They hold the two sentiments 'The world is a beautiful place / The world is a terrible place', in perfect equipoise." He further highlighted the work's "ironic humour" playing over a "euphemism-hungry culture," noting the poems offer no easy salvation yet are "anything but grim."
Solie's Career and the Prize's Legacy
Karen Solie teaches part-time at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, living in Canada for the remainder of the year. Her previous acclaimed collections are:
- Short Haul Engine
- Modern and Normal
- Pigeon
- The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out
- The Caiplie Caves (TS Eliot Prize nominee, 2019)
The TS Eliot Prize, awarded annually for the best new collection of poetry published in the UK and Ireland, is one of the most coveted awards in poetry. The 2024 prize was won by American poet Peter Gizzi for Fierce Elegy. Recent winners also include Joelle Taylor, Jason Allen-Paisant, Anthony Joseph, and Bhanu Kapil.
