Ken Smith was born in Rudston, East Yorkshire, the son of an itinerant farm labourer. He worked in Britain and America as a teacher, freelance writer, barman, magazine editor, potato picker, BBC reader and creative writing fellow, and was writer-in-residence at Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1985-87. He received America’s highly prestigious Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1997, and a...
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This article on the early years of the T. S. Eliot Prize was written and added to the website in 2025. The winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 1998 was Ted Hughes for his collection Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber). The prize was awarded posthumously, Ted Hughes having...
