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).

When Anne Carson won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2001 with The Beauty of the Husband (Cape Poetry) she was the first woman to be awarded the prize. The book, which charts the breakdown of a marriage in 29 ‘tangos’, was described as ‘tart, lyrical, erotic, plain-spoken and highly charged’ by Chair Helen Dunmore who judged the prize with John Burnside and Maurice Riordan. It was Carson’s third consecutive nomination (she would later be shortlisted for Red Doc>).

We asked Anne what she remembered of the experience. She wrote:

My only memory of the T. S. Eliot Prize event is of arriving at my hotel (on Gower Street as I recall) to be told I had no room reservation and therefore no room. Searching about on his computer, however, the desk clerk found an available space ‘at the back under the stairs’, which he referred to as ‘the maid’s room’, and where I eventually parked myself and my suitcase. Quite a small room. However with one window, looking out on a sort of back garden. That night I couldn’t sleep and spent some hours lying on my back staring out the one window. A moonless night so nothing much to see. Suddenly through the utter blackness came the sound of a blackbird. The T. S. Eliot Prize gave me the gift of a blackbird singing in the dead of night and I have been grateful ever since. Though it was Paul McCartney who wrote ‘Blackbird’ (as several people later told me), I like to think Eliot got the idea from John Lennon, the two of them chumming around together, in Heaven.   

Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honours include the T. S. Eliot Prize, a Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Prize, on two occasions, fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature 2020.  

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