In 2023 the T. S. Eliot Prize celebrated its 30th anniversary. We marked the occasion by looking back at the collections which have won ‘the Prize poets most want to win’ (Sir Andrew Motion).

John Burnside won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2011 for Black Cat Bone (Cape Poetry), a book that Chair of judges Gillian Clarke, with fellow judges Stephen Knight and Dennis O’Driscoll, described as ‘an outstanding book; one which the judges felt grew with every reading […] a haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness’. John also judged the competition in 2001 and was Chair of judges in 2019.

We asked John to reflect on his experience as an Eliot Prize winner. He wrote:

My two fondest memories of the Prize? Being a judge in the year that the first woman winner was chosen – Anne Carson in 2001 for The Beauty of the Husband. I am glad to have played a big part in persuading the Chair to read her again, after an unsuccessful first sitting. And then as a surprise winner with Black Cat Bone in 2011. And I really was genuinely surprised. I’d come along to the prizegiving thinking I would stop for a moment and congratulate the winner, then head off for a night out with a good friend of mine, who happened to be passing through London for a couple of days. So I was altogether unprepared for it all, and, when they announced it, I was really taken aback. I don’t think I said another sensible word all night…

John Burnside was the author of novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs, and won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Encore Award and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011, Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T. S. Eliot prizes. All One Breath (2014), The Light Trap (2002), The Asylum Dance (2000) and The Myth of the Twin (1994) – all Cape Poetry – were also shortlisted for the Eliot Prize. John was a professor in the School of English at Saint Andrews University. His pamphlet Apostasy (Dare-Gale Press) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards 2022. John Burnside died on 29 May, aged 69, following a short illness. You can read a tribute to him here.

John Burnside photo © Helmut Fricke.

About the T. S. Eliot Prize

The T. S. Eliot Prize celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2023. Awarded annually to the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland, the Prize was founded by the Poetry Book Society in 1993 to celebrate the PBS’s 40th birthday and to honour its founding poet. The T. S. Eliot Estate has provided the prize money since the Prize’s inception in 1993, and the T. S. Eliot Foundation took over the running of the Prize following the acquisition of the PBS by InPress Books in 2016. For more on the history of the Prize, visit tseliot.com/prize