Congratulations to Carl Phillips, who has been shortlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry with the American edition of Scattered Snows, to the North!

The National Book Critics Circle awards are given each March and honour literature published in the United States in six categories—autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. These are the only national literary awards chosen by critics themselves.

The full shortlist can be found here. The awards will be presented on the 20th March, with a prize reading from the shortlisted writers the night before - more information about both these events can be found here.

Well done to Carl, and all the other shortlisted writers and publishers!

Carl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowledge that's rooted in (always unstable) human memory. If the poet's recent books have been engaged with the theme of power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the value of embracing it and thus of releasing ourselves from the compulsion to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it really happen? If we believe it didn't, does that make our belief true? In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks through the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition – 'tears were tears', mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn't, the way people live until they don't. And there was also joy. And beauty. 'Yet the world's still so beautiful... Sometimes it is...' It was enough. And it still can be.

Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, Phillips's first UK publication, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His most recent prose book is My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). Phillips lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.