Peter Gizzi's Fierce Elegy has won the £25,000 (about $30,435) T.S. Eliot Prize, sponsored by the T.S. Eliot Foundation and honoring "the best new poetry collection published in the U.K. or Ireland." Chair of judges Mimi Khalvati described Gizzi's collection as "infinitely sad, yet resolute, and so alive in body and spirit."
Gizzi's brother, Michael, was also a poet, the Guardian reported, adding that they "founded the former U.S. literary magazine oblék. Michael died in 2010, and Gizzi's other brother, Tom, in 2018. Gizzi himself was diagnosed with a rare form of blood disease in 2021."
In a statement, the judging panel noted: "Written in the aftermath of grief, Peter Gizzi's Fierce Elegy brings us poems that revel in minutiae but also brave the large questions in a lyric sequence of transcendental beauty."