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 2001 was the Canadian poet Anne Carson for her collection The Beauty of the Husband (Cape Poetry). The first woman to win the T. S. Eliot Prize, Carson was presented with a cheque for £10,000, the generous gift of Mrs Valerie Eliot, at an event at Lancaster House, London – see photo, left. The event was hosted by Lady Blackstone, Minister for the Arts, on 21 January 2002.

The judges were Helen Dunmore, John Burnside and Maurice Riordan. In her Chair’s Speech Helen Dunmore said:

The subject of a man’s beauty and his sexual charm is, for various reasons, not yet as widely celebrated in poetry as it might be. Carson writes triumphantly in The Beauty of the Husband: ‘Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty and then there follow all the consequences that lead to the end.’ This is the book of those consequences, brilliantly mapping the dissolution of a marriage in a series of poems which are by turns tart, lyrical, erotic, plain-spoken and highly charged.

The Beauty of the Husband was chosen from a shortlist of ten books:

Gillian Allnutt – Lintel (Bloodaxe Books)

Charles Boyle – The Age of Cardboard and String (Faber & Faber)

Anne Carson – The Beauty of the Husband (Cape Poetry)

Seamus Heaney – Electric Light (Faber & Faber)

Geoffrey Hill – Speech! Speech! (Penguin Poetry)

Selima Hill – Bunny (Bloodaxe Books)

James Lasdun – Landscape with Chainsaw (Cape Poetry)

Sean O’Brien – Downriver (Picador Poetry)

Pascale Petit – The Zoo Father (Seren Books)

Michael Symmons Roberts – Burning Babylon (Cape Poetry)

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.