Ugandan-born British poet Nick Makoha has been named a finalist for the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize for his poetry collection The New Carthaginians (Penguin Books).
In The New Carthaginians, time—and with it, the world—is out of joint. A hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, setting off the crisis that turns Uganda into a pariah state and propelling the young Makoha into exile. The collection draws from that rupture to build a daring meditation on flight and falling, art and identity.
Described by Penguin Books as “a work by an author at the height of his powers,” the book reassembles Western canons of art, history, and philosophy in new and unsettling ways. Inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s collage style, Makoha introduces a trio of figures — the Poet, a Black Icarus, and a resurrected Basquiat — who journey through myth and modernity, gathering symbols of rebirth and resistance.
The 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist was selected from 177 poetry collections submitted by 64 British and Irish publishers. Judges Michael Hofmann (chair), Patience Agbabi, and Niall Campbell praised the ten finalists as works of “great range, suggestiveness and power.”
Michael Hofmann said:
“We read over 10,000 pages of poetry, Niall, Patience and I, and are left with just ten titles on our shortlist. But those titles are of great range, suggestiveness and power; from Entebbe to Manitoba, from blocks of text to threads of voice, there is something here for everyone. And that’s the joy of poetry; while it exists things are never entirely hopeless.”
The T. S. Eliot Prize, awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation, is one of the most prestigious honors in English-language poetry. Each shortlisted poet receives £1,500, while the winner — to be announced on January 19, 2026 — will take home £25,000. The annual Shortlist Readings will be held the evening before at London’s Royal Festival Hall.
About the Author
Dr. Nick Makoha is an Ugandan poet based in London. The New Carthaginians follows his debut collection Kingdom of Gravity (2017), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and named one of The Guardian’s Best Books of the Year.
Winner of the Ivan Juritz Prize, the Poetry London Prize, the Brunel African Poetry Prize and the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Prize (for his pamphlet Resurrection Man), Nick has been writer in residence for the ICA, the Wordsworth Trust and Wasafiri. He is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, a Complete Works alumnus and founder of the Obsidian Foundation. His play The Dark, produced by Fuel Theatre and directed by JMK award-winner Roy Alexander, toured nationally in 2019, was shortlisted for the Alfred Fagon Award and won the 2021 Columbia International Play Reading Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Congratulations, Nick Makoha!
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
