T. S. Eliot Prize News

YOUNG CRITICS SCHEME 2023: 18-25 YEAR OLDS INVITED TO APPLY

The T. S. Eliot Prize and The Poetry Society are delighted to open applications for a second year of the highly praised Young Critics Scheme.

Davina Bacon, who participated in the inaugural Young Critics Scheme, presents a video about her experience on the T. S. Eliot Prize and The Poetry Society YouTube channels.

The exciting mentoring programme offers ten emerging critics, aged 18 to 25 and based in the UK and Ireland, the chance to learn about reviewing poetry collections from experts, and to create their own video review of one of the ten collections shortlisted for the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize 2023. The video reviews will appear on the T. S. Eliot Prize and The Poetry Society’s websites, social media and YouTube channels in the run-up to the announcement of the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize on 15 January 2024.

Applications for the 2023 Young Critics Scheme are now open and must close on 16 August 2023. Find the full details about the programme, and submit your application here.

This year’s scheme follows a hugely successful first year, in which the Young Critics’ video reviews were seen over 25,000 times and shared online by readers, publishers, poets and critics. Several of the Young Critics have since been invited to review for leading magazines including The Poetry Review and Poetry London.

To encourage applicants to this year’s Young Critics Scheme, we asked some of the Young Critics to make videos about their experience on the programme, with reviewing and video-editing tips. Davina Bacon (pictured above) has contributed a wonderful video about her experience to the T. S. Eliot Prize and The Poetry Society YouTube channels. Look out for SZ Shao’s video, which will be published shortly. Two features published on Young Poets Network as part of the 2022 scheme also help young writers prepare for the programme: How To Write A Poetry Review and 15 Top Tips From Leading Critics.

The ten selected participants will attend four online workshops in October and November 2023 on reviewing poetry, editing and video-making, including one led by the acclaimed critic and poet Jen Campbell. They will be assigned one book from the T. S. Eliot Prize 2023 shortlist in early October, and asked to submit a video review by 20 November 2023.

The Young Critics will receive copies of all the shortlisted collections and two free tickets to the celebrated T. S. Eliot Prize Readings at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, London, on 14 January 2024 (or free access to the livestream if they are unable to attend). They will have the chance to meet each other over dinner, and beyond the programme they will receive support from The Poetry Society and T. S. Eliot Prize to form networks and further develop their reviewing careers.

‘The world of reviewing feels more accessible to me than ever, like a potential career avenue,’ commented one of last year’s Young Critics. Watch last year’s video reviews here – and don’t forget to apply in time for this year’s scheme before the deadline of 16 August.

The Poetry Society is the UK’s leading organisation for poetry. With innovative education and commissioning programmes, and a packed calendar of performances, competitions, and digital projects, The Poetry Society champions poetry for all ages. poetrysociety.org.uk

A MARKER IN THE CALENDAR: 2007 WINNER SEAN O’BRIEN ON 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). 

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

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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).

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.