Karen Solie (Russell Hart/Alamy Stock)

Karen Solie’s latest poetry collection Wellwater continues to gather awards internationally.

Solie was named the winner of the international T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize in London on Jan. 19. She is the second Canadian to win the prize; Anne Carson won in 2001.

The £25,000 prize ($46,000 CDN) is administered by the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and honours the best new book of poetry published in the U.K. or the Republic of Ireland. It is the richest poetry prize in the U.K.

It is Solie’s third book of poetry published with a U.K. publisher. Wellwater was published in the U.K. by Picador, in Canada by House of Anansi Press, and by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the U.S.

This award follows on Wellwater being named joint winner of the U.K.’s 2025 Forward Prize for Poetry in October and winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in November. The collection was also shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize.

Solie was one of 11 poets shortlisted for the prize from among 177 titles submitted by 64 British and Irish publishers.

Previous winners of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize include Peter Gizzi, Jason Allen-Paisant, Ocean Vuong, Sharon Olds, Derek Walcott, and Ted Hughes.

This year’s judges Michael Hofmann, Patience Agbabi, and Niall Campbell said of Solie’s poems: “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 humour that plays over our increasingly euphemism-hungry culture.”

Solie, who was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, teaches at St. Andrews University in Scotland and spends half the year in Canada.