T. S. Eliot Prize News

A MARKER IN THE CALENDAR: 2007 WINNER SEAN O’BRIEN ON THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE

,

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). 

Sean O’Brien won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2007 with The Drowned Book (Picador Poetry), a collection described as ‘fierce, funny and deeply melancholy’ by Peter Porter, the Chair of judges in a panel that also included W. N. Herbert and Sujata Bhatt. He has been shortlisted on four other occasions: for Europa in 2018, The Beautiful Librarians in 2015, November in 2011 and Downriver in 2001. He was also a judge in 1997 and 2006.

We asked Sean to reflect on his win and his experiences of the Prize, which date back to the inaugural award presented to Ciaran Carson in 1993. He wrote:

It seems long ago, the first time I went to the T. S. Eliot prizegiving. This was in the days before there was a public reading the previous evening. The event took place at the Chelsea Arts Club in London and the late Ciaran Carson won. I remember spotting Stephen Spender, a great attender and conferencier, one of the last links with the gone world of Auden, MacNeice and the poetry of the 1930s. I ‘saw him plain’ but did not speak with him, for some reason, shyness perhaps.
          Years later I was a judge when Seamus Heaney won. He’d been ill and couldn’t attend, and the prize was accepted on his behalf by his daughter Catherine. Next morning on Today on BBC Radio 4 John Humphrys asked why Heaney wasn’t more angry. Weren’t poets supposed to be angry? Seamus fielded this with his usual grace. When Humphrys turned to me I pointed out that courtesy had a significant place in Heaney’s work. ‘The end of art is peace’, as he put it in ‘The Harvest Bow’.
          Heaney could also laugh at himself. A few years earlier, he broke off from conversation at the prizegiving so that he could be photographed. He sat down and assumed an expression of statesmanlike neutrality. Afterwards he explained: ‘If I smile and then win the prize, the photograph reads: “Heaney smug”. If I look serious and don’t win, it’s “Heaney glum”.’
          The Eliot result is supposed to be embargoed until the award is made, though that’s quite a big word, so perhaps not everyone understands it. The year I received the prize it was not until after the event that my partner told me that earlier on at the hotel, while I was in the shower, there’d been a phone call from the literary editor of one of the newspapers congratulating me. Gerry kept this to herself, for which I’m very grateful.
          Has the T. S. Eliot Prize changed? Obviously it’s become a public event, a marker in the calendar, rather than something largely of interest to poets and publishers. I think the founding principle was to draw attention to contemporary poetry. Large audiences attend the Readings at the Royal Festival Hall, and there is comment in the media on the merits of the shortlisted books. As to the award party, it’s not the Met Ball, but I did once enjoy listening to two female friends of mine discussing, several months in advance, what outfits they ought to wear for the occasion. This is some distance from the Velcro carpet in the struggling arts centre or the lecture room where the organiser of tonight’s reading is nowhere to be found.
          Is this an improvement? In some respects, undoubtedly. But it may be worth reflecting that the T. S. Eliot Prize began before the internet and social media became the frame in which so much experience is viewed and judged and blathered about. As we all know, courtesy and proportion are not the obvious strong suits of a world driven by electronic addiction and prey to rancour, paranoia, tribalism and the rest. At times traces of this have been noticeable at the Royal Festival Hall readings, which is a shame and a distraction from the art of poetry itself, without which nobody would be there in the first place.

Sean O’Brien’s poetry has received numerous awards, including the Forward Prize (three times), the E.M. Forster Award and the Roehampton Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems (Picador Poetry) appeared in 2012 and his latest collection, Embark (Picador Poetry), was published in 2022. His pamphlet Impasse: for Jules Maigret was published by Hercules Editions in 2023. Sean O’Brien’s work has been published in several languages. His novel Once Again Assembled Here (Picador) was published in 2016. He is also a critic, editor, translator, playwright and broadcaster. Born in London, he grew up in Hull. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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. Submissions are now open and will close at the end of July. The 2023 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.

ANTHONY JOSEPH, WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2022, ON PRIZES AS PORTALS

,

In 2023 the T. S. Eliot Prize celebrates its 30th anniversary. We’re celebrating 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 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. Submissions are now open and will close at the end of July. The 2023 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.

‘A RESONANCE THAT CAN BE HEARD EVEN NOW’ – CHRISTOPHER REID ON TED HUGHES’S BIRTHDAY LETTERS, WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 1998

,

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). 

 

Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber) proved a publishing sensation and the T. S. Eliot Prize 1998 was just one of the major prizes that it won. Bernard O’Donoghue, Chair of the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize panel, which also included Simon Armitage and Maura Dooley, said ‘the towering presence of Hughes’s accomplished, powerful and utterly cohesive collection could not be overlooked. It is a truly great book.’

Ted Hughes died in 1998, just a few months after the publication of Birthday Letters. We asked the poet Christopher Reid, Hughes’s editor at Faber, to reflect on the book’s publication.

He wrote:

A year or two before I received the typescript of Birthday Letters, I was on the phone to Ted Hughes. The last decade of Ted’s life was exceptionally productive, even for him, encompassing as it did the publication of such books as Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Winter Pollen, Difficulties of a Bridegroom and Tales from Ovid, and I count myself lucky to have been his editor for most of that period. I don’t remember which book had necessitated the phone call, but at the end of our business discussion Ted, as he was apt to do, threw in an extra, off-topic titbit: he’d been writing, he told me, some poems addressed to Sylvia Plath. Naturally, I blurted out that I’d very much like to see them, my publisher’s crass pouncing instinct probably all too audible down the line. No, they weren’t ready for publication, he said; and when he explained his reasons for withholding them – mainly consideration for the feelings of his family – I doubted I should see them any time soon, if ever.
          The existence of poems addressed to Plath came as no surprise: ‘You Hated Spain’, in which the ‘You’ could have been nobody but his first wife, had been slipped, between the poems of Crow and those of Cave Birds, into Hughes’s  Selected Poems 1957–1981; and the New Selected Poems of 1995 included more than half a dozen among those arranged under the heading ‘Uncollected’. But I could have had no idea of the number of such poems he had written, nor of the patient and purposeful way in which they had accumulated to form the collection that was eventually placed in my hands, before being published a few months later, on 1 January 1998.
          ‘Placed in my hands’ is not merely a figurative turn of phrase. Ted had a strong sense of ceremony, or ritual, when it came to delivering his typescripts, so he drove up to London with various copies for distribution among the Faber personnel. I happened to be off duty on that particular day, but he found his way to my house in north London and made the presentation there in my front room. Taking possession was already a charged affair, but I was overawed when I understood what the collection was, and my awe only increased when I read it, as I did immediately from beginning to end. Matthew Evans, Faber’s managing director, whose guidance Ted always sought, decided that the book should be published as quickly as possible and without the customary publicity fanfare. This in itself generated conspiratorial excitement throughout the firm, all of us strictly enjoined to keep mum, and it certainly sharpened my concentration as I set about composing the editorial notes that were needed. It must also have put the wind up Ted, who was in the incorrigible habit of adjusting and altering his texts, sometimes making radical changes, often without editorial sanction, until the very last moment. Still, it was all managed happily, and Birthday Letters duly exploded on the world with a resonance that can be heard even now.

Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber & Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters. He was Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.

Christopher Reid‘s The Late Sun was published by Faber & Faber in 2020.

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. Submissions are now open and will close at the end of July. The 2023 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.