T. S. Eliot Prize News

‘IT CHANGED MY OWN SENSE OF WHAT I MIGHT WRITE IN THE FUTURE’: HANNAH SULLIVAN ON WINNING THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2018

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In 2023 the T. S. Eliot Prize celebrates its 30th anniversary. We’re marking the occasion by looking back at the collections which have won ‘the Prize poets most want to win’ (Sir Andrew Motion).

Hannah Sullivan won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2018 with her debut collection Three Poems (Faber & Faber), a book the Chair of judges Sinéad Morrissey described as ‘assured, cool, and anthropological in its focus on a life lived via distinct stages and in discrete contexts’.

We asked Hannah to reflect on her experience as an Eliot Prize winner. She wrote:

To win any prize – to be shortlisted for any prize – for a first book, and a book I didn’t for most of my thirties imagine being published at all, would have been a great honour, but it meant a lot to me that it was the Eliot prize. T. S. Eliot was the first poet I cared about and the first poet I taught, laboriously, poem by poem, as a first-year assistant professor. As an undergraduate, I pinned some of his critical obiter dicta onto a cork noticeboard and spent a long time looking at them and not writing anything (‘the unpleasantness of great poetry’).
     Before the Prize Readings, I’d never read in front of such a large audience. I was very nervous and in awe of the poets before me who made jokes, played it off the cuff, even got laughs. The fact that the audience was so receptive meant a great deal in itself. As for the Prize, which was unexpected (I duly made a speech devoid not only of quips but of words), it changed my sense of seriousness and purpose about writing. I am enormously grateful for that. In 2019 I had just turned 40; I had a three-year-old and a one-year-old; a long commute, a busy job; the pandemic would soon make this all more difficult to manage than it had been before. The Prize gave me the liberty to think of myself as a poet, as someone who was allowed to spend time writing poems. It changed other people’s sense of what I’d already written, at least slightly, and that was good luck. But it also changed my own sense of what I might write in the future, and that was a gift.

Hannah Sullivan is the author of Three Poems (Faber & Faber, 2018) and Was It for This (Faber & Faber, 2023). She lives in London with her husband and two sons and is an Associate Professor of English at New College, Oxford. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2008 and taught in California for four years. Her study of modernist writing, The Work of Revision, was published in 2013 and awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy. (Hannah Sullivan photo © Teresa Walton.)

ABOUT THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE

The T. S. Eliot Prize celebrates 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. It has been run by The T. S. Eliot Foundation since 2016. For more on the history of the Prize, visit tseliot.com/prize

The judges of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2023 are Paul Muldoon (Chair), Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul. The 2023 shortlist will be announced in September and the Shortlist Readings will be held on 14 January 2024 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall; tickets will go on sale later this year. The winner of the 2023 Prize will be announced at the Award Ceremony on 15 January 2024.

Sign up to the T. S. Eliot Prize e-newsletter for regular updates about the award. It includes poems and specially commissioned video readings by our shortlisted poets, plus interviews, biographical information, reviews, Readers’ Notes, and news and offers from across the poetry world.

‘I REALLY WAS GENUINELY SURPRISED’ – JOHN BURNSIDE ON WINNING THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2011

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In 2023 the T. S. Eliot Prize celebrates its 30th anniversary. We’re marking the occasion by looking back at the collections which have won ‘the Prize poets most want to win’ (Sir Andrew Motion).

John Burnside won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2011 for Black Cat Bone (Cape Poetry), a book that Chair of judges Gillian Clarke, with fellow judges Stephen Knight and Dennis O’Driscoll, described as ‘an outstanding book; one which the judges felt grew with every reading […] a haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness’. John also judged the competition in 2001 and was Chair of judges in 2019.

We asked John to reflect on his experience as an Eliot Prize winner. He wrote:

My two fondest memories of the Prize? Being a judge in the year that the first woman winner was chosen – Anne Carson in 2001 for The Beauty of the Husband. I am glad to have played a big part in persuading the Chair to read her again, after an unsuccessful first sitting. And then as a surprise winner with Black Cat Bone in 2011. And I really was genuinely surprised. I’d come along to the prizegiving thinking I would stop for a moment and congratulate the winner, then head off for a night out with a good friend of mine, who happened to be passing through London for a couple of days. So I was altogether unprepared for it all, and, when they announced it, I was really taken aback. I don’t think I said another sensible word all night…

John Burnside is a writer of novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs, and has won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Encore Award and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011, Black Cat Bone (Cape Poetry) won both the Forward and the T. S. Eliot prizes. All One Breath (2014), The Light Trap (2002), The Asylum Dance (2000) and The Myth of the Twin (1994) were also shortlisted for the Eliot Prize. John is a professor in the School of English at Saint Andrews University. His pamphlet Apostasy (Dare-Gale Press) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards 2022. (John Burnside photo © Helmut Fricke.)

ABOUT THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE

The T. S. Eliot Prize celebrates 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. It has been run by The T. S. Eliot Foundation since 2016. For more on the history of the Prize, visit tseliot.com/prize

The judges of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2023 are Paul Muldoon (Chair), Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul. The 2023 shortlist will be announced in September and the Shortlist Readings will be held on 14 January 2024 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall; tickets will go on sale later this year. The winner of the 2023 Prize will be announced at the Award Ceremony on 15 January 2024.

Sign up to the T. S. Eliot Prize e-newsletter for regular updates about the award. It includes poems and specially commissioned video readings by our shortlisted poets, plus interviews, biographical information, reviews, Readers’ Notes, and news and offers from across the poetry world.

TWO PASSPORTS, FOUR SHORTLISTS, ONE PRIZE – SHARON OLDS ON WINNING THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE

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In 2023 the T. S. Eliot Prize celebrates its 30th anniversary. We’re marking the occasion by looking back at the collections which have won ‘the Prize poets most want to win’ (Sir Andrew Motion).

Sharon Olds has a long history with the T. S. Eliot Prize, having been shortlisted for the inaugural prize in 1993 for The Father, and shortlisted twice more, in 2009 and 2019. She won the the Prize in 2012 with Stag’s Leap (Cape Poetry), a collection Carol Ann Duffy, Chair of a panel of judges that also included Michael Longley and David Morley, hailed as a ‘tremendous book of grace and gallantry, which crowns the career of a world-class poet’.

What do you remember most about your Eliot experiences, we asked Sharon. A lot! she responded.

I remember the plane trip from J.F.K. to Heathrow (in January 2013) – the extraordinarily long way from the U.S. to the home of one of our father tongues [The King’s English (H. W. & F. G. Fowler, 1931)] – so many colours of water and foam, a few ships, icebergs, clouds. (My poem ‘Approaching Godthåb’, in Stag’s Leap, might have been written during my transatlantic pilgrimage to or from the ceremony for the inaugural Eliot – to which I went, stunned and grateful and anxious, with my shortlisted book The Father.) (The poems in Stag’s Leap were written mostly in 1997 and 1998; I delayed the publication of the book in order to spare my grown children the simultaneous experience of the sudden (-seeming) divorce and the publication of the book which incarnated it – incarcerated? incarnadined? Or not enough blood?)

Next, I remember the wit and subtlety of my fellowe/fellow poets, my pleasure in the daring of their humour, the bite of it (compared to N.Y.C. humor) – the smartness and sometime bitterness of it. (The intelligence and accuracy. The resonance. The political and the linguistical at the same time – Simon Armitage comes to mind! The sheer and the opaque pleasure of his wit.) And it was the first time I heard that if a Brit heard a Brit speak, the hearer knew where the speaker was from – in terms of class as well as topography. I was in (not in) a very different poetry family while there. And I had my Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, and would go lurking in parks near the hotel, in search of any sign of a bunting, chaffinch, brambling, siskin, bullfinch, or carrion crow.

The public rooms of our performances and celebrations were so impressive as to be scary (imperial, like Boston and D.C., only older) – giant silk rugs of gory hunting scenes on the walls! I was grateful and awed to be there. Dorothy, yr not in Berkeley 5, California, anymore. When it was my turn to read from Stag’s Leap, my shortlisted book, I read ‘Known to Be Left’ and ‘Poem for the Breasts’ – then had a chance to talk a little with Patience Agbabi, Sean Borodale and Paul Farley.

My beloved partner (Carl Michael Wallman, 1944–2020) was a profound and hilarious supporter of my ‘divorce book’; after the announcement was made at the Eliot ceremony, I was able to remain calmish and dignifiedish until my friend and editor, Robin Robertson, put in a transatlantic call for me to Graylag, Carl’s nature preserve in New Hampshire (Carl was a retired farmer).

It’s difficult to convey the amount of hope (to regard oneself as seen as maybe good enough) which one receives from such an honour. It was a great pleasure to meet Jacob Polley, and wonderful to see and hear Kathleen Jamie again. And what I remember maybe best is that I had somehow boarded the eastbound plane with no passport. A few days later, having visited the cement bunker of the U.S. Embassy, I had gotten a new passport (and someone having sent me the passport I left behind) I took my westbound passage with two passports – one hidden one not – an official having said to me, Don’t show these both to the same officer.

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the winner of many awards and honours, including both the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her most recent collection, Balladz, was published by Cape Poetry in 2023. Olds teaches on the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the N.Y.U. outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of Isadore Rosenfield Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. (Sharon Olds photo © Brett Hall Jones.)

ABOUT THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE

The T. S. Eliot Prize celebrates 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. It has been run by The T. S. Eliot Foundation since 2016. For more on the history of the Prize, visit tseliot.com/prize

The judges of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2023 are Paul Muldoon (Chair), Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul. The 2023 shortlist will be announced in September and the Shortlist Readings will be held on 14 January 2024 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall; tickets will go on sale later this year. The winner of the 2023 Prize will be announced at the Award Ceremony on 15 January 2024.

Sign up to the T. S. Eliot Prize e-newsletter for regular updates about the award. It includes poems and specially commissioned video readings by our shortlisted poets, plus interviews, biographical information, reviews, Readers’ Notes, and news and offers from across the poetry world.