T. S. Eliot Prize News

REWARDING POETS, READERS AND AUDIENCES: 30 YEARS OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE

T. S. Eliot Prize winners: (top row, from left) Ocean Vuong, Michael Longley, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Sarah Howe, Don Paterson; (second row) Bhanu Kapil, Ted Hughes, Sean O’Brien, Sharon Olds, Roger Robinson, Alice Oswald, Philip Gross; (third row) Joelle Taylor, Anthony Joseph, John Burnside, Les Murray, Hannah Sullivan, Jen Hadfield; (fourth row) Mark Doty, Ciaran Carson, Derek Walcott, Jacob Polley, Anne Carson, Hugo Williams, George Szirtes, Sinéad Morrissey, David Harsent.

From gathering a ‘hot and overwrought multitude […] into the dining room of the Chelsea Arts Club’, to staging the UK’s largest annual poetry event, the T. S. Eliot Prize has grown significantly since its inauguration in 1993. It is now widely regarded as the world’s most prestigious prize for poetry, with winners that include Poet Laureates and Nobel Prize winners alongside newly emerging authors. Poets from the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia and the Caribbean have all featured.

Chris Holifield, whose connection with the Prize spans two decades, chronicles its 30-year history and growth in a new article for the T. S. Eliot Prize website. She charts who won, when and where, spotlighting exciting moments in the Prize’s history (as well as the occasional difficulty to be overcome). A personal highlight for Chris? ‘Visiting Valerie Eliot in the rather grand Kensington flat she had shared with her husband to take copies of the shortlist, and thank her for supporting the Prize’, she writes.

Read Chris Holifield’s history of the T. S. Eliot Prize in full.

YOUNG CRITICS SCHEME 2023: REVIEWERS OF T. S. ELIOT PRIZE SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED

Top row, left to right: Oliver Cooney, Evelyn Byrne, Cal O’Reilly, Chloe Elliott, Natalie Perman. Bottom row, left to right: Urussa Malik, Daniel Clark, Gabrielle Tse, Godelieve de Bree, Leo Kang.

The T. S. Eliot Prize and The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network are delighted to announce the names of the young reviewers who will take part in the Young Critics Scheme 2023.

They are: Oliver Cooney, Evelyn Byrne, Cal O’Reilly, Chloe Elliott, Natalie Perman, Urussa Malik, Daniel Clark, Gabrielle Tse, Godelieve de Bree and Leo Beevers – congratulations to all of them.

The young critics, who are offered both expert mentoring and workshops to help them develop their skills, will each review one of the ten books on the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 shortlist announced on 3 October. Their video reviews will be posted to the T. S. Eliot Prize YouTube channel and on social media. The Young Critics receive copies of all the books on the shortlist and are invited to attend the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on 14 January 2024.

This is the second year the T. S. Eliot Prize and The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network have run this partnership project. Michael Sims, Director, T. S. Eliot Prize, said:

I am delighted that the Young Critics Scheme is running for a second year. Last year’s cohort produced astonishingly lively and insightful video reviews of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022 shortlist, which helped engage a wider audience with the poets and their work. I’m very excited to see and hear how this year’s Young Critics respond to our 2023 shortlist.

You can watch the videos created last year, produced by Aliyah Begum, Eric Yip, Holly Moberly, Noah Jacob, SZ Shao, Lily McDermott, Mukisa Verrall, Davina Bacon and Ruth Awolola, on the T. S. Eliot Prize YouTube channel.

Natalie Perman is a writer and editor. A past Foyle Young Poet, her poems appear in The White Review, The London Magazine and bath magg. An alumna of Genesis Jewish Book Week’s Emerging Writers’ Programme, she is currently working on her debut collection while studying a Master’s in Modern Languages.

Originally from Manchester, Oliver Cooney is a 20-year-old Linguistics student and current president of the Cambridge University Poetry and Prose society. In 2022, his poem ‘Lovely’ was published in the St John’s poetry pamphlet, which he performed alongside other poems at the St John’s donor’s tea and May Ball.

Daniel Clark writes to explore and escape the climate crisis. Nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction awards, he performed vegan poetry at COP26 and co-edits Briefly Zine. Originally from West Yorkshire, he now lives in Cambridge.

Chloe Elliott is a writer based in York. She is a winner of the 2022 New Poets Prize for her debut pamphlet Encyclopaedia. In 2020, she won the Gold Creative Future Writers’ Award. Her writing features in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, bath magg, Magma, The North and Strix amongst others.

Leo Kang lives in West Yorkshire. His poems have been published in Oxford Magazine, Rust and Moth, COUNTERCLOCK, and others. In 2022, he won the Tower Poetry Competition and was a Foyle Young Poet. He is currently studying English at the University of Cambridge.

Urussa Malik is an emerging writer for theatre, film and poetry, poetry critic and translator. She has written reviews for Wasafiri and Modern Poetry in Translation, as well as short plays which have been performed at Oldham Coliseum. She works freelance in the heritage sector and is a trustee for Bradford Producing Hub, an arts funding organisation.

Cal O’Reilly is studying English and Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. They are a Foyle Young Poet and their work has been included in the Irish Times, Cypher’s Magazine, Impossible Archetype and on RTE’s Sunday Miscellany.

Godelieve de Bree is a Dutch-American writer living in London. She has had her work published by Tate and was a member of the 22/23 Roundhouse Collective. She can be found at @godelievedebree on Twitter.

‘I SEE YOU’VE TRAVELLED SOME WAY; BUT WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU GOING?’ – DON PATERSON, A TWO-TIME WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE, REFLECTS ON HIS EXPERIENCES

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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).


Don Paterson is the only poet to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize twice: in 1997 for God’s Gift to Women and in 2003 for Landing Light (both published by Faber & Faber). In commending Landing Light, Chair of judges George Szirtes said: ‘[Don Paterson] offers what Eliot demanded: complexity and intensity of emotion, an intuitive understanding of tradition and what it makes possible, and, at the same time, a freshness that is like clear spring water. His work is superbly authoritative, deeply felt, playful and properly ambitious.’

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

As they say in cybernetics, the purpose of a system is what it does. How might the POSIWID rule apply to prize system? Sure, prizes reward, however capriciously, or unfairly, or incommensurately, or strangely. But what they also do, consistently, is make authors very self-conscious, especially in regard to what they might do next. Prizes will ‘bring things out in you’. In my case, winning the Eliot for God’s Gift to Women let me take myself seriously as a poet, which was a good thing, as I was at the time in danger of putting less important things – or at least things I was less good at, but found more enjoyable – before poetry. Winning it again for Landing Light left me in danger of taking myself too seriously altogether. Initially, I probably did. But the other thing prizes like the Eliot bring you is critical attention. This is always good, for all it may not feel that way at the time. I recall a pretty brutal review by Robert Potts titled ‘None More Black’; the title references Nigel Tufnell’s famous remark on how much more black the cover of Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove album could have been. Even I could laugh. And on the strength of it, I decided I should maybe stop thinking of the poem as a kind of light-subtraction gun. 
     Prizes acquaint you with your luck, not your talent, which only the decades will confirm. (At least ‘thinking you deserve it’ isn’t an option for recovering Calvinists. If a tenner on a scratchcard feels like a smack in the face, a prize is like being hit by a truck.) You shouldn’t forget that your book has been the beneficiary of a literary fashion; it would’ve fallen foul of another. But I remain overwhelmingly grateful that I was fortunate enough to be disrupted in whatever path I was taking. A path without disruption is mostly likely one which, in the end, only you have any interest in pursuing. There are always better ones, but you won’t find them without the instruction to stop and take a long look at the map, or without someone asking ‘I see you’ve travelled some way; but where the hell are you going?

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. As well as the T. S. Eliot Prize, his poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and all three Forward Prizes. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews and, for over twenty-five years, was Poetry Editor at Picador. He also works as a jazz musician.

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.