This week, our poetry news round up looks at the winner of the 2025 TS Eliot poetry prize, the Burns inspired poetry competition and plans to restore William Blake’s cottage back to its 1800 appearance.
2025 TS Eliot Poetry Prize Winner Announced
Karen Solie, a Canadian poet, has been named the winner of the 2025 TS Eliot poetry Prize. The prize has been awarded for Wellwater. This is the poet’s sixth collection of poems, and it explores the destruction of the natural world. The collection is shaped by the poet’s rural Canadian upbringing. She grew up in Saskatchewan which is a province particularly affected by the damaging wildfire season.
The announcement was made in a ceremony that took place at the Wallace Collection earlier this week. Solie will receive £25,000 prize money which comes from the TS Eliot Foundation. Wellwater was also a co-winner of the Forward Prize best collection in October 2025.
This is not the first time that Solie has been nominated for a TS Eliot Prize, her collection The Caiplie Caves was nominated in 2019.
Solie spends her time split between the University of St Andrews where she teaches half time and her home in Canada.
Speaking about the collection one of the judges said that
Stagecoach Customers Invited to Enter Burns Inspired Poetry Competition
In the run up to Burns night the Stagecoach bus company is inviting its Scottish customers to channel their inner Burns and enter a new poetry contest. Titled Bard on the Bus, the competition wants participants to write a short poem that is in the spirit of Robert Burns.
Participants are encouraged to use one of three classic Burns inspired themes for their poem – love, nature, or buses. The prize will be a Scottish-themed hamper.
Stagecoach have even gone as far as suggesting some titles that competition entrants may want to take inspiration from including A Bus Driver’s a Bus Driver for A’ That and Bus O’Shelter.
Trust Hopes to Restore Historic Poet’s Cottage to its 1800 Appearance
The Blake Cottage Trust has submitted plans to restore the former Felpham home of the poet William Blake to how it would have been in 1800.
The Grade II listed cottage on Blakes Road currently includes a full extension that was put in place in 1969 and includes a 20th century garage. The plans are to remove this and leave all of the 18th century masonry of the cottage as it would have been in Blake’s era.
Blake lived in the cottage with his wife from 1800 to 1803 and it is here that he wrote the famous verses
which would later become the preface to his “Milton”: A Poem in Two Books. This was later set to music to become the hymn Jerusalem.
Funds have already been secured to cover the necessary work and the trust has commissioned detailed investigations into the history, development, and archaeology of the cottage as well.
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