A special bonus episode of the Faber Poetry Podcast, taken from our audio vaults to celebrate this week's announcement of the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize. Featuring Isabelle Baafi and Sarah Howe, both shortlisted for their most recent collections, Chaotic Good and Foretokens, respectively.

In this episode, recorded towards the very end of 2024, Rachael and Jack welcome Isabelle and Sarah to the studio to discuss dishes gone wrong, the fun of puns and why poets write about their mothers. Audio postcards in this episode come from Matthew Rohrer, Maurice Riordan and Sasha Debevec-McKenney.

Show Notes

Studio guests

ISABELLE BAAFI is a poet, editor and critic. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress) won the Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her poetry and prose have been published in the TLS, the Poetry Review, the London Magazine, Oxford Poetry and elsewhere. Her debut collection Chaotic Good (Faber, 2025) has been awarded the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

SARAH HOWE is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, won an Eric Gregory Award, and her first collection, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2014, she co-founded Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool. Her new collection Foretokens (Chatto & Windus, 2025) is shortlisted for the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Audio postcards featured in this episode

'Yevtushenko was the King' written and read by Matthew Rohrer, from his collection Army of Giants (Wave Books, 2024).

'The Narcissist' written and read by Maurice Riordan. The poem features in Selected Poems of Maurice Riordan, ed. by Jack Underwood (Faber, 2025).

‘At 33’ written and read by Sasha Debevec-McKenney, from her collection Joy is My Middle Name (Fitzcarraldo, 2025).

About the presenters

RACHAEL ALLEN is the author of Kingdomland and God Complex (both Faber) and co-author of numerous artists’ books, including Nights of Poor Sleep (Prototype), Almost One, Say Again! (Slimvolume), Green at an Angle (Kestle Barton) and Material (Loose Joints). She is the poetry editor for Fitzcarraldo Editions and teaches Creative Writing at Queen Mary University.

JACK UNDERWOOD is a poet, writer and critic. He is author of Happiness (Faber 2015) Solo for Mascha Voice (Test Centre, 2018) and A Year in the New Life (Faber 2021). His debut work of non-fiction, NOT EVEN THIS, was published by Corsair in 2021. He has collaborated widely with composers and artists, and his work has been published internationally and in translation. He is senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College.

The Faber Poetry Podcast is produced by Rachael Allen, Jack Underwood and Hannah Marshall for Faber. Production and editing by Strathmore Publishing. Special thanks to Isabelle Baafi, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Sarah Howe, Maurice Riordan and Matthew Rohrer. All previous episodes are available to stream on Audioboom, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other major podcast listening platforms. This episode was recorded on 26 November 2024.