Wellwater by Canadian poet Karen Solie has won the £25,000 (about $34,220) T.S. Eliot Prize, sponsored by the T.S. Eliot Foundation and "awarded annually to the author of the best new collection of poetry published in the U.K. and Ireland."
Chair of judges Michael Hofmann commented: "In Karen Solie we have an outstanding winner. The poems of Wellwater come from the whole of an adventurously lived life. They hold the two sentiments, The world is a beautiful place/ The world is a terrible place, in perfect equipoise. They offer no happy endings, no salvation in past or future, in epiphany or private happiness. And yet they are anything but grim, with an ironic humor that plays over our increasingly euphemism-hungry culture."
Solie grew up in southwest Saskatchewan. Wellwater is her sixth collection. She previously won the Dorothy Livesay Award, Pat Lowther Award, Trillium Poetry Prize, the Griffin Prize, and was joint winner of the 2025 Forward Prize for Best Collection. She has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Solie teaches for half of the year at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and lives the rest of time in Canada.