Shortlists for the 2020 T.S. Eliot and Baillie Gifford prizes are out

We have two shortlists for literary prizes to share today.

The T.S. Eliot Prize honors the year’s best new poetry collection written in English and is Britain’s most prestigious award for poetry.

The winner, to be revealed in January, receives £25,000 (about $32,000), with shortlisted poets being given £1,500 (about $1,900). 

Here are the contenders; you can learn more about them and the prize on the T.S. Eliot Foundation website:

• Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz.

• Deformations, by Sasha Dugdale. 

• Shine, Darling, by Ella Frears. 

• RENDANG, by Will Harris. 

• Love Minus Love, by Wayne Holloway-Smith. 

• How to Wash a Heart, by Bhanu Kapil.

• Life Without Air, by Daisy Lafarge. 

• How the Hell Are You, by Glyn Maxwell. 

• Sometimes I Never Suffered, by Shane McCrae. 

• The Martian’s Regress, by J O Morgan. 

Also out: the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize shortlist.

Britain’s top nonfiction award brings its winner £50,000 (about $64,000).

Fussy’s dedicated followers may remember that a teenager was originally nominated; Dara McAnulty did not make the shortlist, however.

Here are those who did; the winner will be revealed November 24.

• One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, by Craig Brown. 

• The Idea of the Brain: A History, by Matthew Cobb. 

• Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture, by Sudhir Hazareesingh.

• Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women, by Christina Lamb. 

• Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Woman’s Life in Nineteenth-Century Japan, by Amy Stanley. 

• The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story, by Kate Summerscale.