Joelle Taylor wins TS Eliot poetry prize for ‘blazing’ C+nto & Othered Poems

Judges praise the former UK slam champion’s ‘vivid’ collection, exploring author’s experience of being a butch lesbian

Joelle Taylor has won the TS Eliot poetry prize for her look at butch lesbian counterculture in the 1990s, C+nto & Othered Poems, praised by judges as “a blazing book of rage and light”.

A mix of memoir and conjecture, the collection, Taylor’s fourth, reveals the underground communities forged by women where they could reclaim their bodies as their own. It was announced on Monday night in London that C+nto had beaten collections by major names including Raymond Antrobus, Selima Hill and Michael Symmons Roberts to the £25,000 prize. The TS Eliot award is one of the most prestigious prizes in British poetry and has been won in the past by Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy and, last year, Bhanu Kapil.