Joelle Taylor won the £25,000 (about $33,820) T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, run by the T.S. Eliot Foundation, "for her look at butch lesbian counterculture in the 1990s," C+nto & Othered Poems, the Guardian reported.
Chair of judges Glyn Maxwell said: "Every book on the shortlist had a strong claim on the award. We found it extremely hard to choose between 10 superb collections. The arguments towards the end were passionate and thoughtful, but the choice of the judging panel is Joelle Taylor's C+nto and Othered Poems, a blazing book of rage and light, a grand opera of liberation from the shadows of indifference and oppression."
Taylor is a former U.K. slam champion, who founded the U.K.'s youth slam championships, SLAMbassadors, in 2001. "Joelle originates in performance," Maxwell added. "This collection proves that at the top level, there's very little difference between that, and what's on the page."