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 1994 was Paul Muldoon for his collection The Annals of Chile, published by Faber & Faber. He was awarded £5,000, the generous gift of Mrs Valerie Eliot, at an event at the Polish Hearth Club, London, in January 1995.
Judges Elaine Feinstein (Chair), Ciaran Carson, Candia McWilliam, Robert Crawford and John Fuller praised Muldoon for ‘the energy of his language, the hurtling force of his line and the seemingly effortless spontaneity of his invention’.
Muldoon’s collection was chosen from a shortlist of ten books:
Eavan Boland – In a Time of Violence (Carcanet Press)
John Burnside – Myth of the Twin (Cape Poetry)
W. N. Herbert – Forked Tongue (Bloodaxe Books)
Kathleen Jamie – The Queen of Sheba (Bloodaxe Books)
Geoffrey Lehman – Spring Forest (Faber & Faber)
Paul Muldoon – The Annals of Chile (Faber & Faber)
Tom Paulin – Walking a Line (Faber & Faber)
Peter Porter – Millennial Fables (Oxford Poetry / OUP)
Hugo Williams – Dock Leaves (Oxford Poetry / OUP)
Gerard Woodward – After the Deafening (Chatto & Windus)
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.
