Shearsman NEWS
Eliza O'Toole / Laurel Prize shortlist
Eliza says: “On the day my book was launched at the Small Publishers Fair in London, a browser looked at its cover and said, ‘oh no I don't want to read about the countryside, it’s all fields and farming’. And I thought — how can we ever hope to protect something that isn't cherished. Becoming a finalist means to me that the ‘country-side’, with all its fields and farming, with all of its ‘manifold particularities of the natural world’ has a chance to be recognised, not only as the ‘other' side of the country, but as a unified whole in its own right.“
Eliza O’Toole’s poems have appeared in Shearsman magazine, @rialtopoetry, Tears in the Fence, and Poetry Review. She published The Dropping of Petals (Muscaliet Press, 2021), A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman, 2024) and Buying the Farm (Shearsman, 2025). She was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year 2023/24 for her pamphlet The Unpinning of Moths.
