T. S. Eliot Prize News

REMEMBRANCE AND SURPRISE: GEORGE SZIRTES ON WINNING THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2004

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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).

George Szirtes won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2004 for his collection Reel (Bloodaxe Books). Judges Douglas Dunn (Chair), Paul Farley and Carol Rumens described Reel as ‘a brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of the dislocations and betrayals of history’.

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

Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to win the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2004. I was so surprised when it was announced I couldn’t think of anything to say. It was the first time I had even been on the shortlist – though, after winning, I was shortlisted twice more with other books. Reel, the winning book, my twelfth, was mostly a remembering of my Budapest childhood in the form of twenty-five terza rima sections. Would people be really interested in that? English was my second language, I hadn’t been to university, and having any well received books of poetry at all was the extent of my hopes. Winning made a substantial difference to my life and probably to other people’s perceptions of my work. My next task was to write the T. S. Eliot Lecture, which I delivered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at London’s Southbank Centre some months later. It was primarily about the miraculous instability of language. Since then I have attended almost all of the subsequent readings and prize announcements. I am enormously grateful to have had the privilege of the Prize.

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ágnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe’s Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books include: The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel; New & Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Bad Machine (2013) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Mapping the Delta (2016), another Poetry Book Society Choice, was followed by Fresh Out of the Sky (2021). Bloodaxe has also published his Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, Fortinbras at the Fishhouses: Responsibility, the Iron Curtain and the sense of history as knowledge (2010), and John Sears’ critical study, Reading George Szirtes (2008). His memoir of his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen (MacLehose Press, 2019), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. Szirtes lives in Norfolk and is a freelance writer, having retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia.

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.

2009 WINNER PHILIP GROSS ON THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE’S ‘FLASH OF BRIGHT ATTENTION’

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).

Philip Gross won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2009 for The Water Table (Bloodaxe Books), chosen by judges Simon Armitage (Chair), Colette Bryce and Penelope Shuttle. Armitage described it as ‘a mature and determined book, dream-like in places, but dealing ultimately with real questions of human existence’.

We asked Philip to reflect on his experience of winning the Prize. He wrote:

The best thing that the T. S. Eliot Prize experience did for me was… it surprised me. Utterly. The Water Table had come into the world without particular notice in the places I might have hoped for. I’d been philosophical. Would I trust the way the poetry was leading me, even in the face of scant encouragement? Yes, it seemed that I would. Then the TSE surprise came as an affirmation of that.
          And equally, somehow, it also seemed to free me, not to bind me in the way success can sometimes do. It came with no expectation that I had to try to do the same again. My following book, Deep Field, was outwardly quite different – only I might see the underground streams that link them – but it had the courage to be itself, and so have quite a few more books since then. I thank the Eliot Prize for that, and hope it will never lose that quality of unpredictability – not a routine landmark for the usual suspects, but sometimes a flash of bright attention that lights up a collection’s true quality, maybe even in a way that takes the author by surprise.

Philip Gross was born in Cornwall, the son of an Estonian wartime refugee. He has lived in Plymouth, Bristol and South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His twenty-seventh collection, The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe Books), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. Philip regularly collaborates with other artists, photographers and writers; he also writes poetry for young people – The All-Nite Café won the Signal Award 1994, and Off Road to Everywhere won the CLPE Award 2011. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. (Philip Gross photo by Stephen Morris.)

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.

RECALIBRATION AND CHANGE: BHANU KAPIL ON WINNING THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2020

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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).

Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020, judged by Lavinia Greenlaw (Chair), Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan. ‘Our shortlist celebrated the ways in which poetry is responding to profound change,’ Lavinia Greenlaw said. ‘From this impressive field, we unanimously chose Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart as our winner. It is a radical and arresting collection that recalibrates what it’s possible for poetry to achieve.’ 

We asked Bhanu to reflect on winning the T. S. Eliot Prize. She wrote:

The night I won the T. S. Eliot Prize, I was at home, about to microwave a plate of Indian food, when a friend texted: ‘Congratulations!’ She’d forwarded to the end of the Prize Readings video, something I had not done, precisely because it had not occurred to me to do so. I was so shocked. At that time, it was still the pandemic, and as a carer of an older parent, I was cautious about travel or spending time indoors in groups. Or perhaps the live Readings had been cancelled? And that’s why I was making dinner in my pyjamas, ready to celebrate whoever it was who was about to win? I will never forget the visceral surprise.
          The next morning, I made a red ice heart, like the one I’d created for the ICA performance the book was inspired by, and which I describe in the notes that come at the end of the poems. Then, I placed it in the fresh snow outside my door, to melt. That day, I felt a sense of freedom and possibility, recalling the deep wish I’d had, to write something that could bring me back to the UK after so long in the United States. It’s that wish that manifested as a book, in the first place, thanks to Deryn Rees-Jones and Pavilion Poetry. But publishing a book of poetry does not always mean it will be widely read, in the way that one hopes for or imagines. Sometimes a book is like a stone thrown into the water. It sinks to the bottom, and many years pass before it’s picked up, or read again. That, in fact, had been my experience with all my previous books, all published by small presses in the US. But now, this very specific dream, of writing something that might be read in my birthplace, in one sitting, by many people, had come spectacularly true.
          The experience led to many gates swinging open. I went through them, these cultural gates, but it took some time to feel the congruence between the writer that I am when I am writing in a notebook, and this other writer, the one who’s won a prize. Winning the Eliot Prize was protection, a shield, and it really helped me to re-establish my life in the UK. The money helped immensely, but it was this radical incongruence, of abruptly being or becoming a writer who’d won a prize, that led to great change. I think it has changed the way I write: towards what, and for whom.
          The exhibition Esta Luz, Tóxica (II Movimiento), a collaboration with Giulia Cenci, Georgina Hill and Jonás De Murías, is an example of a curation that the book has flowed into and through, in ways that I don’t think the book could have done without the visibility of the Prize.

Bhanu Kapil is the author of five books of poetry/prose: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), the newly reissued Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), and Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015). She was the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry 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.