This year’s TS Eliot prize for poetry has been awarded to Michigan-born Peter Gizzi for Fierce Elegy, a collection that draws on the poet’s experience of losing his brother.

Chair of judges, the British poet Mimi Khalvati, described Gizzi’s collection as “infinitely sad, yet resolute, and so alive in body and spirit”.

Fierce Elegy, which also won the Massachusetts book award in September, was chosen as winner of the £25,000 prize over nine other shortlisted collections, including Raymond Antrobus’s Signs, Music and Helen Farish’s The Penny Dropping.

Gizzi’s brother Michael was also a poet, and with him Gizzi founded the former US literary magazine oblék. Michael died in 2010, and Gizzi’s other brother, Tom, in 2018. Gizzi himself was diagnosed with a rare form of blood disease in 2021.

“Written in the aftermath of grief, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy brings us poems that revel in minutiae but also brave the large questions in a lyric sequence of transcendental beauty,” read a statement from the judging panel, which was made up of poets Khalvati, Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan.

Gizzi, the author of poetry collections including Now It’s Dark and National Book Award finalist Archeophonics, has long been interested in elegies. “The elegy allows me to explore the significant awareness of periodicity as a measure of the world, the periodicity of a life form, of one’s own life, of others,” he told the White Review in 2020. “It is a way to transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.”

In his Guardian review of Fierce Elegy, Oluwaseun Olayiwola praised the way “lyrics of resignation are juxtaposed with ecstatic lines that reimagine silence as ‘conversations with the dead’”, noting that the poet “redeclares the elegy as the undying practice of the living.”

Alongside Gizzi, Antrobus and Farish on the shortlist were Hannah Copley, Gustav Parker Hibbett, Rachel Mann, Carl Phillips, Katrina Porteous, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Gboyega Odubanjo. All the shortlisted poets will receive £1,500. It is believed that the prize money awarded to Odubanjo, who died in August 2023 at the age of 27, will be donated to the Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation, set up after the poet’s death by his family in order to support low-income Black writers.

The TS Eliot prize is awarded annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland. Last year’s winner was Jason Allen-Paisant for his second collection, Self-Portrait As Othello.