T. S. Eliot Prize News

T. S. Eliot Prize goes to Roger Robinson’s scathing polemic and meditation on love

Roger Robinson has won the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize with his searing collection A Portable Paradise, published by Peepal Tree Press.

Roger Robinson, winner of the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize

After months of reading and deliberation, Judges John Burnside, Sarah Howe and Nick Makoha unanimously chose the winner from a shortlist which comprised  five men, four women and one trans non binary; one American, one Russian-American and one Canadian, as well as poets of Trinidadian, Cypriot and Sri Lankan extraction.

Chair John Burnside said:

“This ambitious and wide-ranging shortlist speaks to all that poetry can be. The winner, Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise, finds in the bitterness of everyday experience continuing evidence of ‘sweet, sweet life’.”

Roger Robinson is a writer and performer who lives between London and Trinidad. He has published two poetry pamphlets with flipped eye, Suitcase (2004) and Suckle (2009), which won the People’s Book Prize and the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize. His first full poetry collection, The Butterfly Hotel (2013), was shortlisted for The OCM Bocas Poetry Prize and his second is A Portable Paradise (2019), both Peepal Tree Press. He is an alumni of The Complete Works and was a co-founder of both Spoke Lab and the international writing collective Malika’s Kitchen. He is the lead vocalist and lyricist for King Midas Sound.  rogerrobinsononline.com


John Burnside formally announced Roger Robinson as the winner of the
T. S. Eliot Prize at an Award Ceremony in the Wallace Collection on Monday 13th January. Roger was presented with a cheque for £25,000 and each shortlisted poet was presented with a cheque for £1,500 in recognition of their achievement in winning a place on the most prestigious shortlist in UK poetry.

The award ceremony was preceded by the thrilling and varied T. S. Eliot Prize Readings on Sunday 12th January, held in the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. In the largest event of the poetry year, all ten poets read to a sell-out audience in a fantastic evening of poetry.


The T. S. Eliot Prize is run by The T. S. Eliot Foundation. It is the most valuable prize in British poetry, with the winning poet receiving a cheque for £25,000 and the shortlisted poets each receiving £1,500. It is the only poetry prize which is judged purely by established poets.

This year’s Prize also continues the collaboration between the T. S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Archive. The T. S. Eliot Prize Winners’ Archive presents a celebration of the Prize and going forward each winner will be inducted into the Archive, so that their voice will be preserved and made available for posterity online.

Last year’s winner was Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems and the judges were Sinéad Morrisssey (chair), Daljit Nagra and Clare Pollard.

For more information on this year’s shortlist, including videos of the poets, new reviews and readers’ notes, and the Prize in general, please visit our Shortlist Page.

We have beautiful recordings of the shortlisted poets reading and talking about their work, a remarkable body of work with 40 videos available on YouTube, as well as audio of the Shortlist Readings.

T. S. Eliot and the London Library

It worked in The Waste Land. But it made work in the British Museum nearly impossible for a young T. S. Eliot.

For no sooner had he settled at his desk each Saturday afternoon than, ‘there sounded the familiar warning’: ‘’Hurry up please, it’s time’. Employed at Lloyds bank, Eliot had only a few precious hours at the weekend for his writing. And by 1918, he’d had enough. So, like many great writers before him and since, T. S. Eliot joined the London Library. He would remain an active member for the rest of his life, serving as President from 1952 until his death in 1965 (during which time one Sir Winston Churchill served as Vice President under him).

It would prove to be an extremely productive place for Eliot down the years, and not just because of the lack of tannoy announcements. The London Library’s idiosyncratic shelving system – where ‘Insanity’ leads to ‘Inns of Court’ and ‘Football’ is followed by ‘Fools’ – was an unending source of delight for such a voracious, allusive and kaleidoscopic imagination as Eliot’s.

The air of productive calm (set off against the bustle of central London), combined with the ability to ‘take ten volumes home with me’ from the open shelving meant that for Eliot, ‘without the London Library, many of my early essays could never have been written’. Eliot recognised it as a place that fires the imagination and cultivates the soul, a place of curious books and even more curious people.

It was something he went out of his way to protect, donating handwritten manuscripts of The Waste Land to Library auctions and even appearing in court as a star witness when the library was under threat in the 1950s, despite troubles with his false teeth ‘which did not allow him to eat raspberries in public’. Eliot was unyielding: ‘the disappearance of the London Library would be a disaster to civilisation’, let alone his own writing.

So if, like T. S. Eliot you are thinking of joining the London Library, and following in the footsteps of the likes of Lord Alfred Tennyson, Virginia Woolf or Hannah Sullivan – much of whose T. S. Eliot prize-winning collection Three Poems was written in the library – then the message is clear: ‘Hurry up please, it’s time’.

Eliot’s joining form, dated October 1918

The London Library offers over one million books and periodicals dating from 1700 to the present day which are all available for borrowing. As a member you can browse 17 miles of open access shelves for an unforgettable voyage of literary discovery.

The T. S. Eliot Prize – A 2019 Retrospective

This year sees the 27th T. S. Eliot Prize being awarded, and the roster of past winners includes some very well-known poets alongside some less known authors that demand further attention.

To refresh the memory of prizes past, the T. S. Eliot Prize website contains a trove of information on the Prize shortlists from 2016, 2017 and 2018. Our YouTube channel also contains many curated playlists, including audio and video from previous prize shortlists, as well as the audio from the much-loved Shortlist Readings from Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall.

If that’s not enough, in 2013 the Poetry Book Society took 36 poets on the road, visiting 10 venues up and down the country. This short film chronicles the Tour, with an emphasis on events at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library, Square Chapel for the Arts in Halifax and Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival.

Among the better-known past winners, Sean O’Brien’s career has seen him win every major poetry prize in the UK, having been shortlisted five times for the T. S. Eliot Prize: in 2001 for Downriver, in 2007 for The Drowned Book (which won the Prize that year), in 2011 for November, in 2015 for The Beautiful Librarians and again this year with Europa (all Picador). Simon Armitage has been shortlisted no less than four times, alongside Pascale Petit and David Harsent, who won the Prize in 2014 with Fire Songs (Faber).

Many poets have been shortlisted twice or more, including Fiona Sampson (twice), Ruth Padel (three times), Paul Farley (four times, including this year’s shortlisting), Kathleen Jamie (twice), Carol Ann Duffy (twice, winning with Rapture in 2005), Jacob Polley (three times, winning with Jackself (Picador) in 2016), Mark Doty (three times, winning in the Prize’s third year with My Alexandria (Cape)), Jen Hadfield (shortlisted twice, winning with her debut Nigh-no-place (Bloodaxe) in 2008), Anne Carson (twice), Sharon Olds (twice, winning in 2013 with Stag’s Leap (Cape), Seamus Heaney (three times, winning with District and Circle in 2006), Robin Robertson (three times), Selima Hill (twice, in 2001 and 2015), Michael Longley (three times, winning in 2000 with The Weather in Japan (Cape)), and John Burnside, this year’s Chair of Judges, who has been shortlisted three times and won the Prize in 2011 with Black Cat Bone (Cape). Don Paterson, who has been shortlisted three times, remains the only poet to have won the Prize twice, in 1997 with God’s Gift to Women and again in 2003 with Landing Light (both Faber).

In the last ten years, the Prize has been won four times by debut collections – Jen Hadfield in 2008 with Nigh-No-Place, Sarah Howe (one of this year’s Judges) with Loop of Jade in 2015, Ocean Vuong in 2016 with Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems last year. Many debut collections have been shortlisted down the years, notably Jacob Polley’s The Brink in 2003, Kathryn Gray’s The Never Never in 2004, Helen Farish’s Intimates in 2005, Frances Leviston’s Public Dream in 2008, Sam Willetts’ New Light for the Old Dark in 2010, Helen Mort’s Division Street in 2013 and Fiona Benson’s Bright Travellers in 2014. This year’s Prize Shortlist contains two debutants – Jay Bernard and Ilya Kaminsky (with his first collection published in the UK), alongside established T. S. Eliot Prize shortlistees such as Sharon Olds, Deryn Rees-Jones and Paul Farley.

A total of seven publishers have won the T. S. Eliot Prize: poets from Faber & Faber have won ten times, Jonathan Cape six, Bloodaxe and Picador three times each, Carcanet twice and Chatto & Windus and The Gallery Press once each.