Canadian poet Karen Solie’s collection Wellwater, published by Picador, has won the £25,000 TS Eliot prize for the best poetry collection published in 2025. It marks a double triumph for Solie, who jointly won the 2025 Forward prize for best collection last year. At the TS Eliot Prize readings on Sunday night she told the audience that her poems were set in south-west Saskatchewan, where she grew up on the family farm. A Guardian review of Wellwater described it as a “blazingly honest catalogue of human-made hazard and harm” that celebrated “contemporary landscapes refusing to be tamed”.

Solie teaches for half of the year at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and lives the rest of the time in Toronto. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Caiplie Caves (2020), which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, and Pigeon (2009), which won a Griffin Poetry prize. Her work has been translated into Dutch, French, and Korean.

Judges Michael Hofmann (chair), Patience Agbabi and Niall Campbell chose the TS Eliot prize shortlist from 177 poetry collections submitted by 64 British and Irish publishers. In announcing the winner at the ceremony at the Wallace Collection in London, Michael Hofmann said the poems of Wellwater "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 humour that plays over our increasingly euphemism-hungry culture.”

WELLWATER

I didn’t know what I had,
drove the watertruck underage to the well
in a swimsuit, anointed with baby oil
to encourage a uniform exposure,
a mild burn atop the tank as it filled
in that burgeoning era of means
to an end. It was a chore
to attend this site of worship
from which song was drawn to feed the souls
of planted trees not native to that place,
as we were not native to that place,
our glyphosate on the wind, our malathion,
dust of gravel roads that bore vehicles
of gas well company agents,
fracking derricks across the county
appearing before, as we said, we knew it.
Blondie tore a strip off the wheatfield,
the tank cooled as the level rose
and I descended to start the engine
so the radio wouldn’t drain the battery —
a mistake I’d made and lived to regret,
which is the only way I ever learn anything.
It took 75 minutes. The things you remember.
My last act before closing the tap
to take the hose by the neck and drink,
taste the cathedral’s rock and temperature,
the water hard and the table high.
The water then, you could still drink it.

From Wellwater by Karen Solie, published by Picador