A former poet laureate and a Pulitzer winner lead TS Eliot prize shortlist

The former poet laureate Andrew Motion and Pulitzer prize winner Jorie Graham are among the 10 poets shortlisted for this year’s £25,000 TS Eliot prize, the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious award for a single volume of poetry.

Motion has been selected for Gravity Archives, while Graham, who was previously shortlisted in 2012, is on the list for Killing Spree.

Motion was the UK’s poet laureate between 1999 and 2009, and has written more than 15 poetry collections, alongside nonfiction books including biographies of Philip Larkin and John Keats. In a Guardian review, Sandeep Parmar wrote that Gravity Archives showcases Motion’s “rooted and resolute eye surveying the mortality of others as well as his own”.

Jorie, who has published 16 collections, won the 1996 Pulitzer prize for poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field, a book of selected poems. In 2012, she was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize for the collection PLACE, which won the Forward prize for best collection.

Along with Motion and Jorie, this year’s shortlist features the British poet and writer Keith Jarrett, whose second collection, Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied, is also shortlisted for this year’s Forward prize. He is a poetry slam champion, and his work has previously been projected on to the facade of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Other shortlisted poets include Imani Mason Jordan, whose PIVOT is their debut collection; the Canadian poet Sylvia Legris, shortlisted for Sleep Gate; and Shara McCallum, whose collection Behold is her seventh.

“Though very different in voice, style and preoccupation, these 10 collections share a determination to meet the challenges faced in difficult times with closer attention to language,” said chair of judges and poet Leontia Flynn. “Each of these books reminds us why, when nothing else makes much sense, it’s to poetry we turn to reorient ourselves.”

The remaining poets on the list are 2022 Forward prize winner Kim Moore, for The House of Broken Things; Holly Pester, for Cafés; Jana Prikryl, for The Channel; and the Irish poet Billy Ramsell, for Render. Mason Jordan’s PIVOT is the only debut on the shortlist.

Flynn appeared on the judging panel alongside the poets Ishion Hutchinson and Daisy Lafarge. The 10 collections were selected from 174 submissions by 65 British and Irish publishers.

The prize was established in 1993 by the Poetry Book Society to mark its 40th anniversary and honour its founding poet, TS Eliot.

The winner will receive £25,000, with each shortlisted poet receiving £1,500. Last year’s prize was won by the Canadian poet Karen Solie for Wellwater. Other recent winners include Joelle Taylor, Jason Allen-Paisant, Anthony Joseph and Bhanu Kapil.

The shortlisted poets will read from their work at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London on 17 January, with the winner announced at a ceremony at the Wallace Collection the following day.