diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 9e754cf..5e8ba77 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
 
 A simple, but opinionated metadata quality checker and fixer designed to work with CSVs in the DSpace ecosystem (though it could theoretically work on any CSV that uses Dublin Core fields as columns). The implementation is essentially a pipeline of checks and fixes that begins with splitting multi-value fields on the standard DSpace "||" separator, trimming leading/trailing whitespace, and then proceeding to more specialized cases like ISSNs, ISBNs, languages, unnecessary Unicode, AGROVOC terms, etc.
 
-Requires Python 3.8 or greater. CSV support comes from the [Pandas](https://pandas.pydata.org/) library.
+Requires Python 3.9 or greater. CSV support comes from the [Pandas](https://pandas.pydata.org/) library.
 
 If you use the DSpace CSV metadata quality checker please cite:
 
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 8998506..7baec28 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ homepage = "https://github.com/ilri/csv-metadata-quality"
 csv-metadata-quality = 'csv_metadata_quality.__main__:main'
 
 [tool.poetry.dependencies]
-python = "^3.8"
+python = "^3.9"
 pandas = "^1.5.1"
 python-stdnum = "^1.17"
 requests = "^2.28.1"