St John’s Writer-in-residence Vona Groarke has been shortlisted for the £25,000 TS Eliot Prize.
The TS Eliot Prize is awarded annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland. The shortlist features 10 collections from established names and new voices, ranging from meditations on illness and inheritance to explorations of ecological collapse and exile.
Groarke has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize for her 2025 poetry collection, Infinity Pool (Gallery Press), alongside nine other established and new poets including Sarah Howe, a former holder of St John’s College’s annual Harper-Wood Creative Writing and Travel Award for English Poetry and Literature.
“I'm thrilled that Infinity Pool has been shortlisted for the 2025 TS Eliot Prize,” said Groarke. “It’s a great honour for the book and it's in great company, alongside books by poets whose work I’ve admired for many years.”
Described by former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion as ‘the prize poets most want to win’ and by The Independent as the ‘world’s top poetry award’, it is considered the most prestigious poetry prize in the world.
The winning poet receives £25,000 and each of the remaining nine shortlisted poets £1,500.
Groarke, a poet, essayist, reviewer and editor, was awarded the distinguished role of Ireland Professor of Poetry this summer.
Howe, who is a Cambridge graduate, won the TS Eliot Prize in 2015 for her debut Loop of Jade and is shortlisted this year for Foretokens.
The prize shortlist was chosen from a record 177 submissions submitted by 64 publishers. The shortlist readings will take place on 18 January 2026 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, with the winner announced the following evening.
Now in its 32nd year, the prize is run by The TS Eliot Foundation and is the only major poetry prize that is judged purely by established poets, who describe this year’s shortlist as ‘something for everyone’.
Groake said: “Whatever happens on 19 January, I feel I've already won the prize of my life just by being shortlisted.”
Described as ‘one of the best writers in Ireland today’, she is the tenth Ireland Professor of Poetry, which is awarded every three years to a poet of honour and distinction to represent the Ireland Chair of Poetry.
She was inaugurated in an official ceremony at the Presidential residence in Dublin in September.
Groake has been Writer-in-residence since 2022 at St John’s, where she mentors St John’s students and staff who want to develop their own creative writing skills, and she organises literary events.
