Creative businesses are few, but their booths are easy to pick out on design alone. ElevenLabs posts an iconic London telephone booth in the hall’s main thoroughfare. Cartoon faces hover over the crowd at Notion’s barista counter, with iPads embedded in the walls for passersby to customise and print portrait stickers in their distinctive graphic style. The Go-to-Market team at Epidemic Sound leans against chipboard topped with sleek CMYK lightboxes, tasteful merch, and rows of over-ear headphones.

These stalls are heavily outnumbered. Scrolling through the list of Exhibitors online when I get home, I count fewer than twenty creative tech firms among nearly eight hundred total.

At first, I considered this merely a reflection of London Tech Week’s remit. Each conference pitches itself to different communities and subsectors. For instance, this week I attended Thomson Reuters Momentum AI, where enterprise reigns. Its speaker list is dominated by blue chip CTOs (a pasta brand, a retail bank) spelling out how to incorporate AI while contending with scale and a legacy tech stack. Even startups are thin on the ground there. Conversely, creatives took centre stage at SXSW London, which populated satellite venues around the city only days before London Tech Week. Media and broadcast were the focus of May’s MPTS, also at London Olympia. So, not every event needs to address every audience.

But I wasn’t quite satisfied. London Tech Week is the city’s marquee tech sector event. Its organisers pull a heavyweight speaker roster to match: The (erstwhile) Prime Minister, HRH Prince William, and the Founders of buzzy scaleups like Wayve and Lovable. At Tech Week, the UK delivers what it considers to be its best pitch to the tech sector. The meagre representation of the creative industries across both the sponsors and speakers undercuts the UK’s nominal strategy. The Government claims it is a priority growth sector, and has even developed a creative sector-specific AI adoption strategy, but leaves it to the side of its largest tech showcase. Quantum, defence, and life sciences—to name but a few other industry applications—do not suffer from such a lack of representation here.

This reflects the strange double standard in the relationship between tech and the creative industries. Creatives are not luddites: the UK Government itself reports high tech adoption across creative subsectors. By mid-2025, over half (53%) of design and designer fashion businesses and 44% of film, TV, video and photography businesses were using AI, compared with only 33% of businesses as a whole. Tech is central to the pitch of creative conferences: “Music, Film, Tech & Culture Collide” (SXSW) or “Bringing together the UK media, broadcast and technology industry” (MPTS). The inverse does not seem to be the case.

A simple explanation offers itself: companies exhibit at tech conferences to pitch to potential customers. Although creative sectors are high-growth and contribute significantly to the UK economy (£146bn in GVA in 2024 and growing twice as fast as the economy as a whole since 2010, for those keeping score), they are structurally dominated by small and micro enterprises. These firms simply cannot offer the lucrative enterprise contracts many tech solutions businesses seek. AWS and Deloitte are at London Tech Week to court the FTSE 100. Even the startup Exhibitors, like Iris.AI and Flower Labs, are built for enterprise R&D and infrastructure budgets.

There is also the risky dynamic of introducing AI to core creative workflows. A cash-strapped creative business clearly benefits from using AI to expedite back-office work in order to free up resources for creative purposes. And indeed, according to the UK Government’s AI Adoption Plan, this is where most of them start. But to extend AI use into their core activities like designing a shirt or composing a soundtrack risks undermining the whole endeavour. Unique creative points of view produce outcomes that surprise, delight, and confound. Contrast drug discovery or software debugging, where the product is the end in itself; we do not imbue the process which generated it with much moral weight. Artists are also justified in their wariness of tech firms. Today’s leading LLMs were trained on masses of information available on the internet, including copyrighted material, without seeking authorisation for its use; Anthropic is currently paying out $1.5bn to authors after it faced a lawsuit for pirating books.

Artistic uses of AI are emerging nonetheless. A recent report from Boston Consulting Group found that over 20% of gaming titles released on Steam in mid-2025 disclosed AI integration—double the year prior—mostly for in-game graphics and other creative assets. But the risk profile is very different according to firms’ positions in the industry. Major studios risk backlash from audiences for even the perceived use of AI. Independent studios with thin margins and low reputational risk, on the other hand, may benefit from AI as a force multiplier and creative tool.

So, creative enterprises must walk a fine line: touting their use of emerging tech to stay competitive and attract investment, while not diluting their product or alienating customers and creatives.

When I speak to a sales representative at the Epidemic Sound stand at Tech Week, he outlines what seems like a good faith effort to support musicians. Epidemic’s primary offering is a subscription library of royalty-free soundtrack music, and they boast a client roster as diverse as GoPro, Levi’s, and Nissan. He describes the roughly 400 musicians they collaborate with out of their HQ in Stockholm. These artists produce the royalty-free library that forms both the training data and off-the-shelf product offer. They feature all over Epidemic’s online presence, no surprise in an industry that continues to prize originality and human authorship. On LinkedIn, Epidemic writes: “Our catalog is continuously created in collaboration with a global community of artists, composers, and producers, whom we support both creatively and financially.” Their homepage rotates through a carousel of featured artists’ names, photos, and genres.

Conference attendees gather around large embedded touchscreens at the booth to test their AI-enabled library search, while the representative details the newest addition to their feature set: customers can prompt to modify the royalty-free tunes for their purposes (“make this slower”). When I ask who owns the rights to those adjusted outputs, he confirms that Epidemic Sound retains full ownership of the finished product.

Whether Epidemic will prevail over competitors like Suno, a Cambridge, MA-based startup which has no qualms about selling entirely AI-generated content for the same purpose, is still to be seen. Suno itself launched a grant programme this week to court independent artists, but included a non-criticism requirement (ironically, named the “Good Vibes Only” clause) which has only increased industry furor. At time of writing, Suno offers its Individual base plan at $8/month to Epidemic’s £9.99/month - or roughly 40% less annually after currency conversion. Of course, Epidemic’s pricing itself represents a steep discount over hiring musicians and composers to soundtrack your advertisement or TV show. Human-made music certainly cannot compete on price.

Epidemic Sound and Suno are disruptors in a subsector where AI adoption severely lags, at only 22% in music, performing and visual arts. But a wholesale distancing from the heart of the tech sector will undercut access to capital that creative businesses sorely need.

I feel most optimistic looking over the lineup for Tech Week’s OnetoWin event, where ten startups pitch for a £1m investment. Two media-tech founders feature in this final round: James Metcalfe of RePro and Ando Eniwumide of Happaning. Creative firms have historically struggled to attract venture capital and other private investment, with business models that are often IP-heavy and project-based. They are over four times more likely than businesses in the wider economy to say that accessing the right finance to fund their growth is an obstacle. More than half (51%) feel that funders view them as too risky. Neither Metcalfe nor Eniwumide win, but against this backdrop, exposure at OnetoWin benefits all sides: the founders receive feedback and exposure to funders, and investors warm to the business models and promise of the sector.

On the final day, I plan to eschew the speaker series entirely. I ride an hour on the overground from North London to pick up a coveted rubber duck from the Overleaf booth and go for coffee with various startups. But I find myself seated at the Deep Tech stage, among rows of attendees sporting silent disco headphones. Tuned in to ARIA’s new CEO, the promise of moonshot UK innovation has us rapt: ambitious, creative, if not in sector then in approach. Reflective clouds to dim the sun. Brain circuits treated with electrical fields and ultrasound waves rather than incisions. My cynicism about the lack of creative tech overcome momentarily, I leave inspired despite myself. It’s science fiction.

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“It’s that Dad came here, to this country, to make you. And the point of making you was that you would hate him. Good, eh?”

“I don’t hate him.”

“An English gentleman, educated. Someone with taste. Someone who would be ashamed of him.“

Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

On Monday, David Szalay’s Flesh was announced as the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize. The Booker, which counts among its past winners literary heavyweights such as Kazuo Ishiguro, J. M. Coetzee, and Margaret Atwood, awards £50,000 and enduring prestige to the author of a work of English fiction published in the UK & Ireland. This year’s Longlist features two debut novels, one past winner, Brits, Americans, a Canadian opera librettist. But, for all the diversity in authorship, there was striking thematic convergence on a single tension at the heart of the immigrant experience. Over half of the longlisted novels grapple with the questions: Can one truly assimilate abroad? If so, at what cost?

Rather than tracing the immigration journey, we often meet our characters years after the fact, as their attempts at assimilation are unsettled by the presence of their fellow countrymen. The protagonists sometimes offer kinship, but more often distrust. At a department event, Serk, a Japanese-born professor of Korean descent in Susan Choi’s Flashlight, is introduced to Tae-Min (“Tom”) Lee, a recent arrival to the United States from Seoul. Mr. Lee introduces himself politely; Serk rebuffs him: “I have never stepped foot in Korea. I was born in Japan.” And when a letter bearing Korean stamps appears in Serk’s mailbox, he verbally assaults Mr. Lee, exclaiming “What goddamn shit is this?... I don’t know what the hell you are—some kind of spy—”

The protagonist of Misintepretation, the debut novel from Ledia Xhoga, finds her marriage unraveling as her translation work for fellow Albanian immigrants in New York bleeds into her home life. Fresh from the strange intimacy of translating for dentist appointments and therapy sessions, she is confronted—often on her literal doorstep—with immigration law cases gone awry, shared family traumas, and entanglements with a criminal underworld.

The individual struggle to navigate identity abroad is generations old. Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter is set in the winter of 1963, the coldest on record in England. Bill Simmons, one of the four central characters, tries his hand at farming in the Somerset countryside. Oxbridge educated, he passes easily for English despite being the son of an Eastern European immigrant. A flashback follows Bill in his childhood, discovering his property magnate father’s certificate of naturalisation which bears the name Somogyi, “He didn’t even tell his brother, Charlie. He was still not sure why. Perhaps it was in case his brother had liked the name and started using it.”

The clearest statement of this theme is found in Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a sprawling family saga which follows two young adults searching for love and purpose abroad in America and at home in India. Like a drumbeat throughout the novel, Desai’s male protagonist Sunny iterates on a refrain: “Trying to make it in America by avoiding one another, as if it was better to be one Indian than two Indians, better to be two Indians than three Indians.” This sensitivity is hardly paranoid. Biggs and Knauss, in their 2012 study of 12,000 leaked members of the British National Party (Reform’s ideological forbear), found that “where segregation is low, a large non-white proportion does not increase the probability of [white British adults belonging to the BNP].” By contrast, segregation bolsters BNP support, especially where South Asian or Muslim populations are large. So, diversity drives more liberal attitudes only so long as the “others” are not too concentrated. Better one Indian than two indeed.

Fixation on the “good,” assimilated immigrant undoubtedly reflects the anxieties of our geopolitical moment. Even the UK’s Labour Government, a rare beacon of victory on the left in recent years, has swerved hard to the right on immigration in a bid to woo voters lost to Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party), threatening to increase residency requirements from 5 to 10 years. Reform would do away with permanent residency entirely. Emboldened by a new Trump presidency, ICE grows increasingly violent. Against this backdrop, the Booker list reveals our preoccupation with how to assimilate without a trace.

The characters ultimately cannot shed their otherness. For some, the project of integration is abandoned by the novel’s end. Sonia & Sunny reconnect in India after her initial attempts to return to America are thwarted by visa application bureaucracy. Szalay’s protagonist returns to Hungary to live out his adult life alone, unable to sustain himself in the UK after a botched interaction with a cabinet minister and the death of his wealthy English wife.

Others seem to integrate by the story’s end only by pulling the ladder up behind them. The narrator of Misinterpretation is stalked by a fellow immigrant. Following the stalker’s disappearance, his Bulgarian girlfriend arrives distressed at the narrator’s apartment. Showing her out, the narrator’s husband threatens: if she comes again, he’ll call immigration.

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These scarce and rare materials make the ceramics industry highly exposed to even moderate fluctuations in the supply chain or production. While we often think of ceramics in the context of homewares (your mugs, plates, bowls), its applications are much broader, from building to specialised manufacturing. Tiling, for instance, accounts for nearly half of global ceramic production. The global ceramics market was estimated at nearly $250B in 2023, with an high annual growth outlook, over 5% annually until 2030,driven by increased global construction and medical demand.

Last year, a group of European researchers reviewed the risk exposure of Europe’s ceramics industry to critical raw materials (García-Ten et al.). Criticality of a resource measures both the risk to its supply chain and its importance to industry. The authors found areas of high exposure across the ceramics industry, owing both to risk from limited material substitutability and supply chain risk.

Glazes, glass-based surface enhancements to ceramics for finish, colour and durability, are among the most exposed elements of the ceramics supply chain. Glazes are typically made of four components: silica (glass), alumina (a stabilisier), fluxes (to control temperature), and colourants. These colourants often contain metals and minerals creating different finishes—chrome oxides for greens, iron oxides for red.

Take, for example, cobalt, known widely for its use in blue colouring. Cobalt is one of the thirteen critical raw materials reviewed by García-Ten et al., and among the highest in both economic importance and supply risk. Its usage across the ceramics industry is historically common and still increasing. Despite this widespread use, it faces significant supply risk factors.

Production of cobalt is highly concentrated. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is by far the highest global producer of cobalt by both value and quantity, with particularly marked advantage in cobalt oxides and hydroxides used in ceramic glazes.

Efforts to substitute for its signature rich blue in ceramic decoration have met with limited success. Some substitutes, such as hibonite, yield a turquoise hue. Other methods which more closely replicate its colour have proven costly and less stable in high heat production conditions.

This combination of factors leads García-Ten et al. to classify Cobalt as an extreme risk to the ceramics industry, highest among their five risk profiles for critical raw materials (ranging from extreme to no risk).

There is some cause for optimism given recent diversification in cobalt production, as Indonesian supply has increased dramatically in recent years (86% year-on-year to 2023). Quantities remain relatively scarce in the face of rising demand in key industries (batteries, aerospace & defense), however. There is continued active research into cobalt substitutes to mediate demand for cobalt.

Of course, all the talk in recent weeks about supply chains has been in relation to Trump’s sweeping tariff policies. What could this mean for the ceramics industry, particularly in areas with such high exposure to global raw material markets? While much of the world was getting hit with sweeping new tariffs, the Democratic Republic of the Congo—leading cobalt producer—was in talks with the Trump Administration over a ‘minerals for security’ deal. The US would get increased access to DRC’s critical mineral and mining assets in exchange for support of the government.

Almost certainly, the ceramics industry is not a factor in Trump’s strategy around cobalt and other rare materials in the DRC. Cobalt’s most significant application is in batteries, particularly for electric vehicles. EVs supported 96% of global demand growth for cobalt in 2023, while ceramics make up a relatively small percentage of cobalt consumption (c. 3%). However, pigments and dyes account for nearly a fifth of “intentionally dissipative uses” of cobalt—those where it is unlikely to be contained or recovered.

While García-Ten et al. focus on resource efficiency and substitutes as key mitigation strategies for the highest-risk critical materials, a potential Trump minerals deal with the Congo may inadverantly drive another of their mitigations: a more secure ceramics supply chain for US industry. The DRC also exports other raw materials used in ceramic production including tungsten (classed as a moderate risk) and copper. A deal stabilising “secure access to CRMs [critical raw material] sources” could make this element of the US ceramics supply chain a rare and unlikely beneficiary Trump’s global trade policies.

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The Barber of Little Rock

The film, titled The Barber of Little Rock , was nominated for Best Documentary Short Film at the 2024 Academy Awards and is now available to view on The New Yorker’s YouTube channel. It follows Arlo Washington, a successful entrepreneur from a historically Black neighbourhood of Little Rock, Arkansas. Due to histories of redlining and economic deprivation, the area continues to be underserved by banks and even ATMs, with limited commercial real estate. In response, Washington founded People Trust, through which he makes small grants and loans to members of the community. They use this capital variously to start businesses, relocate, or just get back on their feet. Barber addresses head-on questions of injustice, reparations, and racial inequality.

You’ll have to wait until the penultimate card of the credits sequence to see a mention of PayPal. Even then, it is paired with a disclaimer that “As part of their shared commitment to building an inclusive economy and closing the racial wealth gap, they had no editorial role in the making of this film.”

Executive producer Dan Cogan notes that the sponsorship came about through a personal connection between PayPal and the film’s creative team, and that PayPal viewed it as “a brand alignment with a certain set of values.” (Try saying that phrase to a Victorian child.)

Another guest on the podcast describes Adobe’s foray into similar sponsorships. In their case I find the motivation clear: Adobe’s customers are predominantly creative firms and professionals. Funding independent films, photography, or other creative projects both directly benefits certain members of their consumer base and signals more widely their desire to give back to the industry. But why would PayPal, a more practical than creative utility, sponsor a short film?

Value set or virtue signal?

It has become commonplace for corporations to define and publicise a core set of brand values. Barber is a clear match for PayPal’s. The subpage for “Issues & Advocacy”—one of PayPal’s five stated core values—describes a particular commitment to small business: “Supporting the growth and sustainability of small enterprises through innovative policies and initiatives that provide them with the tools and resources they need to thrive.”

Unlike Adobe’s support of creative projects, however, funding a film does not directly financially benefit PayPal’s consumer base of small merchants and their customers. They have in fact taken this direct approach in the past, with a 2022 business grantmaking programme. The Venmo Small Business Grant offered $10K to twenty selected Venmo Business Profile Customers.

Cogan argues that the sponsorship and Academy Award Nomination gave PayPal “all of these bragging rights, and all of these things that they could talk about that were brand-aligned.” But if this was an exercise in brand-building (or, less generously, virtue signalling), why so quiet? PayPal’s press coverage of the sponsorship was scant. In my research, I found only a single tweet from the company in March 2024. The film is nowhere to be found among the press releases on PayPal’s corporate newsroom page. The Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of Barber’s awards season run name-checks Dwayne Wade as Executive Producer, and makes no mention of PayPal. Only devoted film buffs would watch to the very end of the credits sequence and spot the brand name.

Maybe this isn’t a customer marketing tool at all, but a signal to employees. In the wake of the pandemic, alignment with corporate values was a particularly important factor for jobseekers and employee retention. Further, a 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer report notes that while the importance of corporate values is on the rise, less than half of employees reported that their employers live up to their impact promises. PayPal funding a film that advocates their values—especially one that does not explicitly advertise the firm—indicates an altruistic spirit to their employees.

What are PayPal’s politics?

Barber has a conspicuous left lean: it directly confronts the link between racial and economic injustice in America and the persistent effects of the carceral system. The New Yorker consistently ranks towards the left of mainstream American media. This might seem a strange partnership for a firm whose name has most often been in the news of late for the so-called PayPal mafia’s heavy influence in the Trump administration.

To unpick the politics of today’s PayPal, we can follow the money. Per FEC disclosures, Alex Chriss, the current CEO, made two $1000 donations to Kamala Harris in the runup to the 2024 election. Chairman John Donohoe has donated to both Democrats and Republicans. A company’s actions need not necessarily align with its leadership’s personal political leanings, it must be said. Peter Thiel’s Palantir has a self-avowed socialist at its helm (albeit an ‘anti-woke’ one).

As for the company itself, PayPal has reportedly been staffing up with lobbyists in recent years, nearly doubling its lobbyists in the period from 2020-2024. The fintech spent north of $1.6M on lobbying in 2024, more than any previous year on record. Most of this has been on tax-related legislation (lowering).

All this paints a picture of centrist to centre-left, broadly pro-business politics. Not notable on its own, but certainly an indication that the film partnership might be borne more of savvy brand positioning than political conviction.

Patronage is power

As more corporate interests fund creative projects, I’m skeptical that this model can come entirely without strings attached. To be perfectly clear, I don’t intend to cast into doubt the editorial independence of Barber. In the face of continued economic pressure on creative industries, novel funding mechanisms for the arts are welcome. But particularly if the projects that receive funding are those that “align with brand values,” this leaves the arts exposed to corporate value shifts in era trending sharply away from the inclusion and progressivism that have defined recent decades.

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We all recall the NFT fervor of the COVID era. We laughed, we cried, Paris Hilton shilled her Bored Ape on Jimmy Fallon. However, less ubiquitous in mainstream media was another art and blockchain crossover: a wave of companies promising its potential to authenticate art and trace transactions in the market.

As with so much in the world of blockchain, their value proposition was equal parts technological and ideological. While exact products varied, these startups proposed to modernise key legal aspects of the art market, including provenance and sales. All this while righting inequalities of the industries: rewiring compensation structures through technology and ensuring high-quality, traceable and persistent data about works of art outside of major institutions.

A key selling point was resale royalties for visual artists. The argument here is clear. Unlike the music industry, where an artist might see royalties every time a commercial featuring a song they wrote is played on television, visual artists only see funds from primary sale, and have not reaped the benefits of explosive growth in the secondary market or late-career uplifts due to recent progress in equity and inclusion. In the absence of droit de suite laws common in Europe and elsewhere worldwide (over 70 countries, per The Art Newspaper’s Maxwell Anderson), many US artists do not have the right to benefit from resale of their works. Emerging technology could solve this, advocates posited, by hard-coding royalties or artist equity into contracts on the blockchain.

Lobus, founded by ex-Sotheby’s and Christie’s co-founders, raised $6 Million in 2021 for its blockchain art asset management platform. By 2022, more rising stars were hitting the center of the art world. Art Basel celebrated the launch of Arcual at its 2022 fair. Fairchain’s Charlie Jarvis was featured in Forbes 30 Under 30.

But search today, and you’ll find that Lobus’ Instagram has been inactive since December 2023. Fairchain’s homepage announces that the platform is closed, effective August 1, 2024. So what went wrong?

The Oracle Problem

“The Oracle Problem” is a pithy crypto-native phrase for the difficulty of connecting real-world information to the blockchain.

Blockchains, by design, operate according to strict, immutable encoded rules. They are also decentralised, relying on consensus between all “nodes” (i.e. computers) that hold copies of their ledger. This insulates them from outside influence, and is intended to reduce the power of any single actor and increase trust.

“Oracles” are most often referenced when attempting to input outside information onto the blockchain (the weather, the market price of a commodity). A single source of truth—for instance, a single API call to fetch the price of gold—would undermine the decentralisation that is central to blockchain’s appeal. A call from every node, on the other hand, would almost certainly yield conflicting answers.

The flavour of the Problem that these art startups faced is more straightforward: How do you link the blockchain to art works, objects that ultimately exist in the physical world? No matter how secure and tamper-proof a ledger of provenance is from a technological perspective, it relies on human inputs to “keep up” with the real world, in exactly the same way a paper trail would.

Fairchain opted for the legalistic take that the blockchain sales agreement transfers the title—no matter where the physical object is, the title holder is the owner. This approach passes muster at first glance. However, with art we are concerned not just with who legally owns the object, but where it has been, who has looked after it, so that we might follow its journey through time. If Thomas Kaplan lent me Vermeer’s “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal” to keep in my flat in London (a girl can dream), its physical location in another country and my stewardship of the work would form key elements of its provenance. A blockchain that only tracks the transfer of legal title is at best incomplete, and at worst practically useless. Blockchain’s immutability also poses its own set of issues, if details need to be appended or changed based on new information about a work.

Verisart provides QR codes to stick to artworks that link to their certificates of authenticity. What if you removed this sticker and attached it to a fake? Or changed the content of the webpage at the code’s destination?

Pure traditionalism

The fatal blow to these companies was simpler still. In an early interview with New York Magazine’s The Cut, Jarvis said of the pushback on Fairchain’s concept “In the beginning, you get a bunch of people saying, ‘Oh, this could never exist — not that it’s a bad idea, necessarily, but that there’s no path to adoption.’” She was right; the art market retains a strong traditional strain.

Change for change's sake—or even for such altruistic motives as increased equity for artists—will not spur the adoption of high-tech new systems and standards.

While online sales continue to rise (up 7% year-on-year, and twice their pre-pandemic value) the most prominent sales continue to take place offline. According to the Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report 2024, while offline auctions are dominated by lots greater than $1 million, “58% of the value of the online-only fine art auction market in 2023 was sales of lots priced at less than $50,000.” At bottom, this seems a question of an industry somewhat set in its ways.

Disruptors might be better off targeting participants more open to technological change. Retail investing has seen a shakeup and democratisation with companies like Robinhood and eToro, finding huge success by opening financial markets to a young, tech savvy consumer base. A fresh wave of startups promises fractional ownership in artworks as an investment asset class (I’m intrigued by Masterwork’s clear, almost PE-adjacent strategy, holding works and distributing profits to investors when they resell). Or, just start small. A friend working at a major London gallery tells me that they just adopted their first CRM.

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Disclaimer: Arcual originated as a joint venture between BCG Digital Ventures and Art Basel/LUMA Foundation. Views expressed are solely my own and do not represent the views of Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

Established in 1993, the Prize is awarded annually to the best new collection of poetry in English published in the UK or Ireland. Past winners include such poetic heavy-hitters as Ted Hughes and Sharon Olds. Its literary influence is uncontested. Less discussed is how neatly its thirty-odd year history maps that of the industry at large: showcasing the countervailing trends of a consolidation of power in the hands of a few major publishers while visible representation and diversity of its nominees increases.

Power players

The story of publishing through the Prize’s first two decades was a near-perfect mirror of the broader trends sweeping the publishing industry. Since the turn of the 21st century, there has been an overall consolidation, with high-profile mergers throughout the 2010s, including the 2013 merger of Penguin and Random House (the US Justice department recently blocked a further attempt by Penguin Random House to acquire competitor Simon & Schuster).

The T. S. Eliot Prize was no different. The top five publishers by all-time number of titles in the Prize—Faber & Faber, Bloodaxe Books, Cape Poetry, Picador Poetry, and Carcanet Press—accounted for only two thirds of shortlisted publications in the 90s. By 2024, they accounted for over three quarters of both all-time nominated titles and winners.

The early consolidation was swift; the 2000s saw a sharp decline in unique publishers. Oxford University Press (Oxford Poetry), for instance, all but got out of the game entirely. Publishing 10% of all nominees in the 1990s, it has not published a single shortlisted title since 1998. Carcanet Press, Cape Poetry, and Picador Poetry, by contrast, have more than doubled their respective shares over the history of the prize, rounding out the robust set of top five publishers together with early leaders Faber & Faber and Bloodaxe.

Both Picador and Cape Poetry are imprints from major publishing houses—Penguin Random House and Pan Macmillan, respectively. These big-label imprints saw particular success in the 2000s and 2010s, when representation from outside the top five publishers was at its lowest. Picador’s spike was dramatic. Publishing just 3% of nominees in the 1990s, Picador was among the top three publishers represented in both the 2000s and 2010s. The London-based imprint has published former British poet laureate (and 2005 Winner) Carol Ann Duffy, as well as notable fiction authors such as Bret Easton Ellis and Don Delillo.

Things may be looking up for the underdogs, however. The number of unique publishers represented has rebounded in the 2020s, rising above its previous high in the 1990s. Again for the first time since the early history of the prize, the share of titles by publishers outside the top five has risen back above one third of all nominees. Most strikingly, of this decade’s winners, only one to date has been published by one of the top five publishers: Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self Portrait as Othello (2023 Winner, Carcanet Press).

Representation matters

Despite broad consolidation towards powerful publishing houses since the early days of the Prize, it has progressively opened its reach in nominees, in step with broader consumer trends and preferences of younger generations for authentic and diverse representation.

1. Gender parity*—The Prize awarded its first female winner in 2001, Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband (Cape Poetry). Gender parity has solidified in the 2020s: Both this year and last year’s shortlists were majority female or non-binary, with nearly an equal number of men and women winning this decade to date. Non-binary poet Gustav Parket Hibbett was shortlisted for this year’s prize.

2. Across the pond—Eligibility for the prize is contingent on publication in the UK and Ireland, so unsurprisingly the poets skew British and Irish. There is an expanding strain of representation from North America, however. In this year’s cohort, there were three American poets, the highest yet this decade. (I was most excited to learn that two of this year's poets, Carl Phillips and winner Peter Gizzi, are based in my home state of Massachusetts.)

3. Wait till next year—Since its inception, the judges have shortlisted nearly 200 unique poets. Repeat appearances are the norm. Nearly a third of nominees have appeared on the shortlist more than once; the average winner has been nominated three times. But debuts are on the rise: while only two debut collections have won the Prize to date, both have been awarded within the last decade—Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2017 Winner) and Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade (2015 Winner).

Mirror of the market

TLDR: The history of the T. S. Eliot Prize captures a market in tension—industry power consolidates in major corporates, yet consumer diversity and media representation increases.

• A shifting balance of power through the 2000s and 2010s favoured imprints of major publishing houses above independent poetry publishers. Recent years, however, show some renewed momentum for smaller players.

• In parallel, the shortlisted poets and nominees are increasingly young and diverse, speaking to a diverse readership. The increased presence of women and nonbinary poets, debut collections, and poets from outside the UK and Ireland promise a broad reach in years to come.

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*Gender as proxied by pronouns used in Wikipedia, poet website, and T. S. Eliot prize bios

Amidst the general coverage, the Getty Villa museum has emerged as somewhat of a flash point, as media outlets and witnesses watched on to see whether the museum would be caught in the Eaton fire’s path. The Villa, operated by the J. Paul Getty Trust, sits in a recreation of a Roman villa in California’s Pacific Palisades, inspired by the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. It is home to a prominent collection of more than 40,000 art works and artefacts from the ancient world. Despite its location at the heart of the ongoing disaster, the outlook is optimistic. As of latest reports from the museum team, while grounds around the building have been affected, the collection remains safe. The Villa took careful preparatory measures, designing its buildings to the highest fire-proof standards with double-walling and air conditioning. More recently, they aggressively cleared and thinned plant material in the direct vicinity of the site.

Museums are hardly strangers to decisive action to protect their collections in times of crisis. During the Blitz, Churchill's government relocated major works from galleries in London to castles in Wales (or underground into disused tube tunnels, in the case of the Elgin Marbles). The evacuation of the Museo Nacional d’Art de Catalunya’s collections during the Spanish Civil War is detailed in the museum’s new Art & The Spanish Civil War gallery, opened in 2021. The Getty, perhaps surprisingly, does not feature evacuation in its risk mitigation plans for climate events. President and CEO Katherine Fleming elaborates in an interview with NPR: due to the protective measures taken on the grounds and in building design, she argues, “the safest place for the items to be in an event like this, wild as it sounds, is to be at one of our sites.”

As the climate crisis develops and natural disasters intensify, risk mitigation and disaster planning will be critical. Museums, galleries, and heritage sites are particularly vulnerable. Their irreplaceable physical artefacts often require careful conditions for conservation, to say nothing of the attendant difficulty of any relocation at scale. And while floods and fires pose clear existential threats to collections, museum works and infrastructure may be no less vulnerable to marginal temperature change, demanding ever more resource-intensive internal climate management systems to maintain proper conditions. Despite this, according to a 2022 Network of European Museum Organisations report, “only 3 in 10 museums have analysed the climate impacts they are likely to be challenged by.”

As in so many other spheres of climate impact, we have good reason to believe the most devastating will not be felt equally across the industry. There is precedent, of course, for striking inequality of this sort: During the Blitz evacuations, every work from the National Gallery was relocated. Other institutions (even, somewhat ironically, the Imperial War Museum) were forced to prioritise which to evacuate and which to leave behind. This morning, Altadena’s Bunny Museum burned while the Getty Villa sealed its library archives to smoke with “state-of-the art air handling systems.”

To be perfectly clear, I believe it is very good that the Getty has the technology and resources to protect its collections. In Fleming’s words, “We [at the Getty] hold on behalf of the world.” But the world must be able to hold its own. In the face of increasingly extreme conditions, we ought to ensure best practices for climate risk mitigation are not exclusive to those institutions prestigious and well-funded enough to apply them.

In 2017, the Louvre opened a new conservation and storage facility in Liévin, purpose-built for a world in climate crisis: The location was selected to protect against risk of “centennial flooding.” Facilities feature “cutting-edge technology to guarantee stable climatic conditions.” This future-proofing did not come cheap, with the French footing a €60M bill. Of this, €19M was paid by the Louvre itself. This outlay was funded with proceeds from the $520M deal licensing use of the Louvre name to Abu Dhabi—owner of 7% of the world’s crude oil reserves.

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