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 on Monday evening.
A Prize for Poetic Excellence
The TS Eliot Prize, organised by the TS Eliot Foundation, is one of the most significant awards in the poetry world, recognising the best new collections published in the UK and Ireland each year. As the 2025 winner, Karen Solie will receive £25,000 in prize money. This marks Solie's first outright win of the award, having been previously nominated in 2019 for her collection The Caiplie Caves.
Wellwater is Solie's sixth published volume of poetry. The collection, which co-won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in October 2024 alongside Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidyā, grapples profoundly with the destruction of the natural world. Its perspective is deeply informed by Solie's upbringing in rural Saskatchewan, a Canadian province ravaged by increasingly severe wildfire seasons.
The Judges' Verdict on a Winning Collection
The judging panel for the 2025 prize comprised poets Michael Hofmann, Patience Agbabi, and Niall Campbell. In announcing the winner, chair of judges Michael Hofmann praised Wellwater for its balanced and unflinching vision.
"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 noted the collection's "ironic humour" playing over a "euphemism-hungry culture," concluding that the work is "anything but grim."
Solie's collection triumphed over a strong shortlist that included works by Tom Paulin, Isabelle Baafi, Nick Makoha, and Sarah Howe.
A Career Defined by Acclaimed Collections
Karen Solie's poetic voice has been honed across a distinguished career. Her previous award-winning collections include:
- Short Haul Engine
- Modern and Normal
- Pigeon (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize)
- The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out
- The Caiplie Caves (TS Eliot Prize nominee, 2019)
Solie divides her time between Canada and the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where she teaches part-time. The 2024 TS Eliot Prize was awarded to American poet Peter Gizzi for Fierce Elegy, following recent wins by Joelle Taylor, Jason Allen-Paisant, Anthony Joseph, and Bhanu Kapil.
Critics have hailed Wellwater as a vital and timely work. In a review for the Observer, Jade Cuttle described it as a "blazingly honest catalogue of human-made hazard and harm" that celebrates "the contemporary landscapes refusing to be tamed." The prize solidifies Solie's position as a leading poetic voice on the global stage, offering a poignant and artistically rigorous response to the pressing environmental crises of our age.
