This article on the early years of the T. S. Eliot Prize was written and added to the website in 2025.
The winner of T. S. Eliot Prize 1993 was Ciaran Carson for his collection First Language, published by the Gallery Press. He was awarded £5,000, the generous gift of Mrs Valerie Eliot, at an event at the Chelsea Arts Club, London, on 20 January 1994.
Carson’s collection was chosen from a shortlist of ten books. Judges Peter Porter (Chair), Edna Longley and John Lucas picked six collections from over 100 books submitted by publishers. The four Poetry Book Society Choices, chosen by PBS selectors Fleur Adcock and Robert Crawford, completed the list. The shortlisted collections were:
Simon Armitage – The Death of King Arthur (Faber & Faber)
Moniza Alvi – The Country at My Shoulder (Oxford Poetry / OUP)
Patricia Beer – Friend of Heraclitus (Carcanet Press)
Ciaran Carson – First Language (Gallery Press)
Carol Ann Duffy – Mean Time (Anvil Press)
Douglas Dunn – Dante’s Drum Kit (Faber & Faber)
James Fenton – Out of Danger (Penguin Poetry)
Stephen Knight – Flowering Limbs (Bloodaxe Books)
Les Murray – Translations from the Natural World (Carcanet Press)
Sharon Olds – The Father (Secker & Warburg)
Don Paterson – Nil Nil (Faber & Faber)
This article, compiled from contemporary reports, has been published to provide a fuller picture of the T. S. Eliot Prize history.
The T. S. Eliot Prize was inaugurated by the Poetry Book Society in 1993 to mark the Poetry Book Society’s fortieth birthday, and to honour its founding poet. The T. S. Eliot estate has provided the prize money since the Prize’s inception, and the T. S. Eliot Foundation took over the running of the Prize in 2016, following Inpress Books’ acquisition of the PBS.
