Saskatchewan-born poet Karen Solie wins T.S. Eliot Prize for Wellwater

Moose Jaw-born poet Karen Solie's sixth collection of poems, Wellwater, has won the 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize. 

Wellwater is a poetry collection, published in 2025, that explores the intersection of cultural, economic and personal ideas of value. It addresses themes of aging, housing and environmental and economic crises.

Celebrating persistence in the natural world, Wellwater offers a message that hope is the only way to address these issues. 

In October, the collection also won the 2025 Forward Prize for Poetry.

The T.S. Eliot Prize winner receives £25,000 (approx. $47,150.00 Cdn). It is awarded to the best collection of poetry published in the U.K., or Ireland annually. Solie was the only Canadian poet shortlisted for the prize this year.

Solie spoke with CBC Books when she was shortlisted. She said that she was very grateful because it "creates that little bit of publicity for the book when resources for poetry are in short supply " and allowed her to attend an event with poets she'd been reading for years.

At the time, she also discussed Wellwater's powerful, emotional undercurrent.

"The book is dedicated to my dad who died while it was being finished," Solie said, "so his presence is very strong for me in the book, even when the poems don’t really address that loss."

She spoke about the power of poetry in depth, concluding with a timely statement about the place of art in the world, adding even more significance to the dedication: "Art is a conversation that can offer comfort in a world that can often feel lonely."

Solie was a 2023 Guggenheim fellow and teaches half-time for the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She spends the rest of the year in Canada. Her other poetry collections include Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out and The Caiplie Caves. 

"The poems of Wellwater come from the whole of an adventurously lived life. 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," the prize jury said in a statement.