In 2023 the T. S. Eliot Prize marks 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).
When Sinéad Morrissey won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2013 with her collection Parallax (Carcanet), Ian Duhig, who chaired a judging panel which also included Imtiaz Dharker and Vicki Feaver, said: ‘Politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.’
We asked Sinéad to reflect on her experiences of the Prize – for which she had been shortlisted several times. She wrote:
I first became aware of the T. S. Eliot Prize when Anne Carson won with The Beauty of the Husband in January 2002. I knew she’d won because she gave a lecture at the Southbank Centre later that year, on Sappho, and fragments, and gaps, which had blown my mind almost as much as The Beauty of the Husband itself. The Battle of Borodino, Ray, the wine press, all the lights on in the house – I’d never read a collection like it. The lecture that followed was called the T. S. Eliot Prize Lecture. ‘Slide, please’, Anne Carson kept saying, tipping her head up at the black box at the back of the auditorium where the technicians lived, and I knew I was in the presence of genius.
The Prize played a major role in my life over the course of the next decade. While I was at that same festival, news came through that my second collection, Between Here and There, had just been shortlisted. I was astonished. At the ceremony, grateful to even be in the room, I drank grapefruit juice out of long glasses and felt incredibly relaxed. ‘Who do you think should win?’ asked Michael Longley, Chair of the judges, as we coincided on the stairs. ‘Alice Oswald,’ I answered, ‘for Dart. It’s the best book on the list.’
Two more shortlistings for my two subsequent collections followed. The readings were intense. Then the ceremonies. Not winning the T. S. Eliot Prize was becoming routine. At the awards event in January 2014, shortlisted for my fifth collection, Parallax, I was backing my way into a plant pot, trying to pre-empt recurring disappointment, when Ian Duhig began his speech.
I was welcomed back in Belfast with a handmade laurel wreath by my dear poet-friend, Jean Bleakney, and an impromptu party. Though it’s a decade ago now – inexorably, another ten years has passed – and though winning is never a given, but rather an extraordinary stroke of brightly-coloured luck – being awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize changed my life.
Sinéad Morrissey’s awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), first prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times Poetry Now Award (2009, 2013), the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate (2013-14) and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. (Sinéad Morrissey photo by Florian Braakman.)
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 multi-award-winning poet and, from 2003, Professor of Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast, Ciaran Carson died on 6 October 2019. You can read a tribute to him on 