Forward prize winner Vahni Capildeo shortlisted for TS Eliot poetry award

The Trinidadian writer joins Alice Oswald, Ian Duhig and Denise Riley among the final 10 vying for the UK’s richest poetry prize

After landing the £15,000 Forward prize for best collection in September, the Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo is in the running for the UK’s richest award for poetry, the £20,000 TS Eliot award.

Measures of Expatriation, which explores identity and the alienation of the expatriate, is one of 10 collections in the running for the prize. It is up against collections from Alice Oswald, Ian Duhig and Denise Riley, all of which also appeared on the Forward shortlist. Oswald’s Falling Awake examines mutability; Duhig’s The Blind Road draws from both Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the life of the 18th-century polymath Blind Jack Metcalf; and Riley’s Say Something Back revolves around her late son and includes her long poem about grieving and loss, A Part Song.

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