Gillian Allnutt's Lode shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2025
'Constraint and freedom, protection and danger – in Lode, Allnutt brings the full force of history to bear upon the words she weighs and, under these pressures, she holds diamonds in her hands. [...] There is plenty of white space in Lode, but one does not have to dig too far beneath its surface to strike magnetite, and then the forces of attraction pull everything together. Lode looks small – but it’s huge.' – John Field, TS Eliot Prize reviewer
Gillian Allnutt's Lode, the tenth collection from the winner of the 2016 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, is on the ten-strong shortlist for the TS Eliot Prize 2025. The shortlist was announced on 6 October 2025.
Judges Michael Hofmann, Patience Agbabi and Niall Campbell chose the shortlist from 177 poetry collections submitted by 64 British and Irish publishers. The diverse list comprises seasoned poets, two debuts, two second collections, four previously shortlisted poets (among these Gillian Allnutt) and a former winner. Poets come from the UK, Ireland, St Lucia, Canada and the USA.
Chair of Judges, Michael Hofmann, said:
‘We read over 10,000 pages of poetry, Niall, Patience and I, and are left with just ten titles on our shortlist. But those titles are of great range, suggestiveness and power; from Entebbe to Manitoba, from blocks of text to threads of voice, there is something here for everyone. And that’s the joy of poetry; while it exists things are never entirely hopeless.’
All ten poets will be invited to read from their collections at the TS Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings held at London's Southbank Centre on Sunday 18 January 2026.
The winner of the 2025 Prize will be announced at an award ceremony in London on Monday 19 January 2026. The shortlisted poets will each be presented with cheques for £1,500 and the winner will receive a cheque for £25,000 – the most valuable prize in British poetry.
Details of all the shortlisted poets are on the TS Eliot Prize website here.
Last year’s winner was Peter Gizzi for his collection Fierce Elegy (Penguin Poetry). The two Bloodaxe titles shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024 were both fourth collections from poets based in the North of England: Rhizodont by Katrina Porteous, and The Penny Dropping by Helen Farish. Previous winners of the TS Eliot Prize published by Bloodaxe include George Szirtes (2004) and Philip Gross (2009).
The TS Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings will be held at London's Southbank Centre on Sunday 18 January 2026, 7pm. In person tickets available here. Livestream tickets here.
Sign up to the TS Eliot Prize Newsletter here for weekly videos, reviews and Readers' Notes for each of the shortlisted poets.
Gillian Allnutt was the Poet in Focus on 16 October 2025, and John Field's excellent review of Lode is linked to. Read the newsletter here.
Gillian contributed a lovely piece about writing to the Poetry School’s Writers’ Notes feature for the 2025 TS Eliot Prize shortlist. Read the feature here.
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For print or digital review copies of Lode, please contact Christine Macgregor at publicity@bloodaxebooks.com.
For interview requests in connection with the TS Eliot Prize, please contact:
Gina Rozner: ginarozner@icloud.com, tel 07887 811806; or Michael Sims: michael.sims@tseliotprize.com, tel 07940 221825
Lode is Gillian Allnutt's tenth poetry collection, and was published by Bloodaxe Books in May 2025. Her poem 'Crabapple moon' from Lode was Highly Commended by the 2025 Forward Prize Judges.
The lode in Gillian Allnutt’s title picks up on two of the many meanings of the word. A lode can be a course, a way, a journey; also a road, a lane. Her collection traces a journey through time, the time of her own life and of our lives, since the Second World War. Lode also means guidance, here the guidance afforded by the continuity and relative stability – economic, cultural, spiritual – of Britain’s postwar years, the setting of the first part of the book.
Gillian Allnutt was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1988 she returned to live in the North East. She won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award in 2005 and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010. She received The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2016. In 2025 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Bloodaxe Books has published Gillian Allnutt’s poetry since 1994. Her retrospective How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007) draws on six published books plus a new collection, Wolf Light, and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. It includes poems from her collections Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel, which were both shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe are indwelling (2013) and wake (2018), with her tenth collection Lode published in May 2025.
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SOME REVIEWS FOR LODE
‘This is her 10th collection, showing work that becomes ever more closely focussed, not only on her immediate surroundings but on connections — both material and spiritual — to a larger world. [...] In recent collections Allnutt’s poetry has settled into a close and quiet attentiveness to the minutiae of life, and how this informs our relationship with things of the spirit. She is writing of herself, of her own observed experience, but this expands to become universal. This is in sharp contrast to much of what is published in the third decade of the twenty-first century and we should treasure her work, reading it slowly and giving it the contemplation it deserves.’ – D.A. Prince, The High Window
‘This latest collection from the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry winner unfolds as a triptych: beginning with war and its aftermath, moving through the strange terrain of the Covid era, and arriving in an unsettled present. The poems draw deeply from the spiritual and natural worlds, as well as the lives of the poet and those closest to her. These are spare words, minimal and restrained. […] And Lode? A journey, a seam of buried ore. Something discovered, uncovered – gleaming quietly, like this collection.’ – Jane Pikett, The Northumbrian
'…there’s no better poet alive in England, and no better poet of England, either. […] At its best – which is most of it – Allnutt’s poetry is lovely, strange and wise. These are profound and beautiful meditations on ordinary lives and the miracle of everyday language.' – Victoria Moul, The Times Literary Supplement
‘Lode is the new collection by Gillian Allnutt, a poet whose extraordinary and elegant work is deeply placed within the North. Lode is a personal journey, much of it taking place in County Durham, where Gillian Allnutt has lived for decades. Her latest collection is a landmark work full of insight, observation and learning, taking us deep into her unique poetic world.’ – Will Mackie, New Writing North (New and Recent Poetry from the North)
'Allnutt's power is in her restraint. [...] The last line of verse in the collection is 'World without edge'; a fresh doxology for a still unknowable modern world, and the perfect final note for a quietly boundless collection that confirms Allnutt as one of the best English poets writing today.' – Mary Anne Clarke, The Little Review
‘...plain speech made devastating. [...] Allnutt’s poems move between playfulness and austerity, eccentricity and anonymity. […] this latest book may yet make her a lodestar for more readers, if they find their way to it. They should.’ – Jeremy Wikeley, The Telegraph (on Lode, his Poetry Book of the Month for May 2025)
'There are some indelible images in the poems […] More than this, Allnutt suggests there is a space beyond time that we can sometimes glimpse, and perhaps even gain comfort from…’ – Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian (Poetry Books of the Month)
INTERVIEW WITH GILLIAN ALLNUTT ON BBC RADIO 4
The Verb, BBC Radio 4, Sunday 22 June 2025, 5.10pm
Gillian Allnutt was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s The Verb on 22 June 2025. She was talking to host Ian McMillan about her tenth collection Lode. Gillian read her poem ‘Audience’ twice at Ian McMillan’s request ‘because it’s so short and so beautiful’. She also read and introduced her poems ‘Azuma Meditation’, ‘Solitude’ and ‘Roughage’, the latter being one of 40 haiku she wrote in the months before lockdown.
‘Ian McMillan is joined by Harriet Walter, Jason Singh and Gillian Allnutt. Plus glacier poetry with Andri Snaer Magnason and Manjushree Thapa.[...] Poet Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal in 2016 - and her new collection Lode has been celebrated for its 'indelible images'. Gillian reads a poem about meeting the Queen, in which the word 'plimsoll' plays a surprising part, and another poem in which she invents the word 'ditheridoo'.’
The programme is available on BBC Sounds. Gillian features from 22:45.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002dz3y
2021 INTERVIEW WITH GILLIAN ALLNUTT IN MONK
MONK magazine, Issue 2, October 2021, online 5 April 2022
An eight-page interview with Gillian Allnutt, focusing on poetry and spirituality, featured in the second issue of MONK, an international magazine exploring creativity and spirituality. The article appeared in print in October 2021, and was posted online on 5 April 2022. It was illustrated with a specially-taken photo of Gillian at her home in County Durham, and a double-page photograph of Durham Cathedral. The article was entitled ‘Under Northern Skies: Divinations of a Warrior Poet’.
The magazine also featured Gillian's new poem about Mary Magdalene, commissioned by BBC Radio 2 in Spring 2021, which is now published in Lode (2025).
https://monk.gallery/interviews/gillian-allnutt-under-northern-skies-divinations-of-a-warrior-poet/
[06 October 2025]
