T. S. Eliot Prize News

‘I REALLY WAS GENUINELY SURPRISED’ – JOHN BURNSIDE ON WINNING THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2011

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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).

John Burnside won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2011 for Black Cat Bone (Cape Poetry), a book that Chair of judges Gillian Clarke, with fellow judges Stephen Knight and Dennis O’Driscoll, described as ‘an outstanding book; one which the judges felt grew with every reading […] a haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness’. John also judged the competition in 2001 and was Chair of judges in 2019.

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

My two fondest memories of the Prize? Being a judge in the year that the first woman winner was chosen – Anne Carson in 2001 for The Beauty of the Husband. I am glad to have played a big part in persuading the Chair to read her again, after an unsuccessful first sitting. And then as a surprise winner with Black Cat Bone in 2011. And I really was genuinely surprised. I’d come along to the prizegiving thinking I would stop for a moment and congratulate the winner, then head off for a night out with a good friend of mine, who happened to be passing through London for a couple of days. So I was altogether unprepared for it all, and, when they announced it, I was really taken aback. I don’t think I said another sensible word all night…

John Burnside is a writer of novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs, and has won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Encore Award and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011, Black Cat Bone (Cape Poetry) won both the Forward and the T. S. Eliot prizes. All One Breath (2014), The Light Trap (2002), The Asylum Dance (2000) and The Myth of the Twin (1994) were also shortlisted for the Eliot Prize. John is a professor in the School of English at Saint Andrews University. His pamphlet Apostasy (Dare-Gale Press) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards 2022. (John Burnside photo © Helmut Fricke.)

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.

TWO PASSPORTS, FOUR SHORTLISTS, ONE PRIZE – SHARON OLDS ON WINNING 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).

Sharon Olds has a long history with the T. S. Eliot Prize, having been shortlisted for the inaugural prize in 1993 for The Father, and shortlisted twice more, in 2009 and 2019. She won the the Prize in 2012 with Stag’s Leap (Cape Poetry), a collection Carol Ann Duffy, Chair of a panel of judges that also included Michael Longley and David Morley, hailed as a ‘tremendous book of grace and gallantry, which crowns the career of a world-class poet’.

What do you remember most about your Eliot experiences, we asked Sharon. A lot! she responded.

I remember the plane trip from J.F.K. to Heathrow (in January 2013) – the extraordinarily long way from the U.S. to the home of one of our father tongues [The King’s English (H. W. & F. G. Fowler, 1931)] – so many colours of water and foam, a few ships, icebergs, clouds. (My poem ‘Approaching Godthåb’, in Stag’s Leap, might have been written during my transatlantic pilgrimage to or from the ceremony for the inaugural Eliot – to which I went, stunned and grateful and anxious, with my shortlisted book The Father.) (The poems in Stag’s Leap were written mostly in 1997 and 1998; I delayed the publication of the book in order to spare my grown children the simultaneous experience of the sudden (-seeming) divorce and the publication of the book which incarnated it – incarcerated? incarnadined? Or not enough blood?)

Next, I remember the wit and subtlety of my fellowe/fellow poets, my pleasure in the daring of their humour, the bite of it (compared to N.Y.C. humor) – the smartness and sometime bitterness of it. (The intelligence and accuracy. The resonance. The political and the linguistical at the same time – Simon Armitage comes to mind! The sheer and the opaque pleasure of his wit.) And it was the first time I heard that if a Brit heard a Brit speak, the hearer knew where the speaker was from – in terms of class as well as topography. I was in (not in) a very different poetry family while there. And I had my Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, and would go lurking in parks near the hotel, in search of any sign of a bunting, chaffinch, brambling, siskin, bullfinch, or carrion crow.

The public rooms of our performances and celebrations were so impressive as to be scary (imperial, like Boston and D.C., only older) – giant silk rugs of gory hunting scenes on the walls! I was grateful and awed to be there. Dorothy, yr not in Berkeley 5, California, anymore. When it was my turn to read from Stag’s Leap, my shortlisted book, I read ‘Known to Be Left’ and ‘Poem for the Breasts’ – then had a chance to talk a little with Patience Agbabi, Sean Borodale and Paul Farley.

My beloved partner (Carl Michael Wallman, 1944–2020) was a profound and hilarious supporter of my ‘divorce book’; after the announcement was made at the Eliot ceremony, I was able to remain calmish and dignifiedish until my friend and editor, Robin Robertson, put in a transatlantic call for me to Graylag, Carl’s nature preserve in New Hampshire (Carl was a retired farmer).

It’s difficult to convey the amount of hope (to regard oneself as seen as maybe good enough) which one receives from such an honour. It was a great pleasure to meet Jacob Polley, and wonderful to see and hear Kathleen Jamie again. And what I remember maybe best is that I had somehow boarded the eastbound plane with no passport. A few days later, having visited the cement bunker of the U.S. Embassy, I had gotten a new passport (and someone having sent me the passport I left behind) I took my westbound passage with two passports – one hidden one not – an official having said to me, Don’t show these both to the same officer.

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the winner of many awards and honours, including both the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her most recent collection, Balladz, was published by Cape Poetry in 2023. Olds teaches on the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the N.Y.U. outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of Isadore Rosenfield Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. (Sharon Olds photo © Brett Hall Jones.)

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.

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.