Northumberland poet Katrina Porteous on the 10-strong shortlist for the prestigious TS Eliot Prize

The prize is awarded annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland, and the contenders include Katrina Porteous – who has lived in Beadnell since 1987.

Her Rhizodont collectio is named after a three-metre-long fossil fish found on the Northumberland coast in 2007.

As Katrina writes in her introduction to the collection, published by Bloodaxe Books, the poems begin in former coalmining communities of East Durham, where her grandfather was a pitman, and travel north to the shores of Northumberland just south of Berwick.

Chair of the judging panel for the TS Eliot Prize, Mimi Khalvati, said: “Our shortlisted poets are wonderfully diverse in style, theme and idiom, embracing myth, pop culture, sport, faith, trans identity, AI – a gamut of present and past life.

“Throughout these collections runs a strong strain of elegy, responding to our dark times with testaments of loss and grief. There is also humour, intimacy, joy and energy – poems to make you well up, to inspire you to write, and most of all to invite you to read.”

The winner will be announced at a ceremony at The Wallace Collection in London on the evening of January 13.

Katrina was presented with a Cholmondeley Award in June 2021, an accolade which recognises the achievement and distinction of individual poets.