Joelle Taylor wins the 2021 T.S. Eliot Award for her 'blazing' poetry collection

Congratulations to Joelle Taylor who, last night, won the prestigious T. S. Eliot Awards for C+NTO and Othered Poems, praised as a 'blazing book of rage and light' by judges, the collection enters the private lives of women from the butch counterculture, telling the inside story of the protests they led in the ‘90s to reclaim their bodies as their own – their difficult balance between survival and self-expression.

The £25,000 award is one of the most prestigious prizes in British poetry and has been won in the past by Ted Hughes and Carol Ann Duffy.

George Maxwell, who chaired the award, said the winning collection was “pretty autobiographical, about her life as a butch lesbian, and the hostility she suffered as a kid in a conventional family. But then there’s also imaginative renderings of nightlife – of lesbian clubs, some of which are kind of hellish and some of which are heavenly,” he said. “It’s kind of enraged, but it’s this sort of rage which generates light, and it’s a really vivid read – it’s quite something.”

Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet and author who prior to the pandemic completed a world tour with her collection Songs My Enemy Taught Me. She is widely anthologised, the author of 4 collections of poetry. She has received a Changemaker Award from the Southbank Centre, a Fellowship of the RSA, and her poem Valentine was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize. She is a co-curator and host of Out-Spoken Live, a poetry and music club currently resident at the Southbank Centre; and the commissioning editor at Out-Spoken Press.

Published by The Wesbourne Press/Saqi Books in June 2021, C+NTO was picked as one of Bernadine Evaristo's 'Books of the Year' for both the New Statesman and the TLS.

'Meaty, inventive, powerfully moving work' - The Telegraph

‘This writing is visionary – I was taken to the heart of a dense poetic history, saw every image as though I were living it. What a powerful thing to experience in a book. I loved it.’ Hollie McNish

'An excellent book of poetry by JOELLE TAYLOR exploring how some lesbian women’s histories, political destinies, safety and survival are tied to their physical identity' - the Morning Star

'I won the TS Eliot Prize last night. It was a triumphant moment of visibility for butch women.' -- Joelle Taylor, The Independent

'unlike anything I’ve ever read before. Partly autobiographical, it excavates, foregrounds and celebrates the lives of butch lesbians through the most memorable and often astonishing poetry that is at once epic and intimate.’ -- Bernardine Evaristo, TLS

‘meaty, inventive, powerfully moving work’ -- The Telegraph

'nothing short of a triumph.’ -- Idler

‘Written with equal parts love and anger, C+nto & Othered Poems hurls the reader through the doors of a lesbian bar in 1990s Soho.’ -- The Telegraph

Post date:

01/11/2022 - 10:57

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