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).
In announcing Anthony Joseph’s Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury Poetry) as the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022, Jean Sprackland (Chair), judging alongside Hannah Lowe and Roger Robinson, said: ‘Sonnets for Albert [is] a luminous collection which celebrates humanity in all its contradictions and breathes new life into this enduring form.’
We asked Anthony Joseph to reflect on the experience of winning. He said:
Prizes, like the T. S. Eliot Prize, act like portals; they are open spaces, not only for the poets, whose profiles are lifted, but also for readers, opening worlds and corners of experience. This is especially true when the poet comes from a community which has not been at the ‘centre’ of western literary tradition. When I first started publishing work, these major prizes were something that seemed to happen in a distant galaxy, far away from what I was doing or where I was. In the last few years they’ve become more accessible, more of a real possibility for writers like myself. And that’s a great thing, for all of us.
Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, academic and musician. He was the Colm Tóibín Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool in 2018, was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship 2019/20 and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at King’s College London. Anthony is the author of five poetry collections: Desafinado, Teragaton, Bird Head Son, Rubber Orchestras and, most recently, Sonnets for Albert, published by Bloomsbury. He has also written three novels including: The African Origins of UFOs; Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon, which was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and longlisted for the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; and The Frequency of Magic. As a musician he has released eight critically acclaimed albums. Anthony was born in Trinidad and lives in London. (Anthony Joseph photo by Adrian Pope.)
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
