T. S. Eliot Prize News

JAMES CONOR PATERSON ON CIARAN CARSON’S ‘THE BRAIN OF EDWARD CARSON’

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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).

First Language by Ciaran Carson (Gallery Press) was awarded the first T. S. Eliot Prize in 1993.

L to R: James Conor Patterson (photo: Aimée Walsh) and Ciaran Carson (photo: Gerard Carson, The Gallery Press)

James Conor Paterson, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022 for his collection bandit country (Picador), paid a wonderful tribute to Ciaran Carson, his former teacher, at the T. S. Eliot Prize Readings at the Royal Festival Hall in January. So we asked James to recommend a poem from Carson’s T. S. Eliot Prize-winning First Language. He wrote:

The one I’m thinking of is called ‘The Brain of Edward Carson’. It concerns influential Irish Unionist politician Edward Carson, who was responsible for the Ulster Covenant, the establishment of the Ulster Volunteer Force and for involvement in the Government of Ireland Act and the partition of the island. Ciaran’s poem about Carson is characterised by his use of the long line, training his curatorial eye on creating an atmosphere of a particular place and time, and incorporating the rhythms of Irish traditional music into the lyric form.
          Edward Carson is presented here as the corpse of Ulster splayed out on an autopsy table, a kind of automaton made up from machine parts and the detritus associated with the Irish War of Independence era. Similar to Heaney, Ciaran’s work utilises symbolism with an exactitude that speaks to larger socio-political issues and the legacy of war on contemporary Ireland.

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 the Gallery Press website. 

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.

CIARAN CARSON’S FIRST LANGUAGE: INAUGURAL WINNER OF 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).

With a title befitting a newly inaugurated award, Ciaran Carson won the first T. S. Eliot Prize in 1993 with First Language (Gallery Press), the fifth of his critically acclaimed collections.

John Lucas, who was on the panel in 1993, alongside Peter Porter (Chair), Fleur Adcock, Edna Longley and Robert Crawford, described the judging process in his report for the Poetry Book Society Bulletin: ‘We were in broad agreement about the best five collections, but could we agree about which was the best of the best? Perhaps we ought to name our top three choices, Peter [Porter] suggested, and list them in descending order. We went round the table and suddenly it was all over. Three out of five judges had First Language at the top of their list. Ciaran Carson was the winner.’

Ciaran Carson sadly died in 2019. We asked Peter Fallon, his publisher at Gallery Press, to look back on Ciaran’s win. He wrote:  

That Ciaran Carson’s First Language received the inaugural T. S. Eliot Prize is, in almost all respects, no surprise. To return to this collection – a book which opens with a poem in Irish (with a title in French) followed by a poem called ‘Second Language’ – is to be reminded that this protean poet followed from the beginning the reminder he includes in ‘Two to Tango’: ‘And you make sure you don’t repeat yourself.’
          First Language, hot on the heels of Ciaran’s thrilling, unlike-anything-else The Irish for No (1987) and Belfast Confetti (1989) with their long, rambling lines, broke from the narrative-driven to an almost rhyme-led formal exhibition of poems as fresh, even still, as new paint. ‘We’d done a deal of blow’, begins ‘Grass’ and there’s a drug-filled and fuelled adventure to the often preposterous chimes and rhymes in wholly original poems and brilliant afterwords of Ovid (of course), Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s ‘Drunk Boat’, culminating in the collection’s masterpiece, ‘The Ballad of HMS Belfast’.

Peter added:

No surprise that it received the award ‘in almost all respects’… but in one it is. Though the T. S. Eliot Prize announces itself as open to the ‘best collection of new verse published in the UK or Ireland in any particular year’, this is the only time an Irish-published book received the award. Something has changed. While in the first half of the Prize’s life Gallery Press books featured regularly on the shortlist none has been included since 2009. Similarly with the Forward Prizes, as nominally ‘open’ to books published in the UK and Ireland, while Gallery books and a Gallery author were included in each of their categories in 2002, winning two of them, and a Gallery book won the Best Collection Prize in 2003 these were the last, and only, times Irish-published books appeared on their lists. The books we’ve been publishing in the last twenty years are as good as ever. Was that all a healthier time? A time with language first, wherever it came from?
          Long life to the T. S. Eliot Prize for books published in the UK and Ireland.

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 the Gallery Press website. (Ciaran Carson photo by Gerard Carson, The Gallery Press.)

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.

THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2023 CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE IN POETRY; PAUL MULDOON TO CHAIR THE JUDGING PANEL

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L to r: Sasha Dugdale; Paul Muldoon (photo: Gary Doak); Denise Saul (photo: Karolina Heller)

As the T. S. Eliot Prize celebrates its 30th year, the T. S. Eliot Foundation is delighted to announce the judges for the 2023 Prize: the panel will be chaired by Paul Muldoon, alongside Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul. 

The judges will be looking for the best new poetry collection written in English and published in 2023. The Prize is unique in that entrants are judged by their peers; the panel always consists of established poets.  

Paul Muldoon said: 

‘It’s an honour to chair the T. S. Eliot Prize as it celebrates 30 years of excellence in poetry. I look forward to reading numerous collections, discovering remarkable new voices and rediscovering familiar ones, as I work alongside my distinguished fellow judges Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul.’

Michael Sims, Director of the T. S. Eliot Prize, said: 

‘We are delighted to be celebrating three decades of the T. S. Eliot Prize. Every year since its inauguration, the aim of the Prize has been to pick the best original book of poems in English, published within the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Over 30 remarkable years this laudable aim has not wavered.’

Paul Muldoon won the T. S. Eliot Prize 1994 for his collection The Annals of Chile (Faber and Faber) and was also shortlisted for Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) and Horse Latitudes (2006); he was Chair of judges in 2000.

Sasha Dugdale’s most recent collection, Deformations (Carcanet), was shortlisted for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize. Denise Saul’s debut collection, The Room Between Us (Pavilion / Liverpool University Press), was shortlisted in 2022.

The call for submissions will go out in June, with the submission window closing at the end of July. 

The T. S. Eliot Prize 2023 Shortlist Readings will take place on Sunday 14 January 2024 at 7pm in the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall as part of its literature programme. This is the largest annual poetry event in the UK.

Tickets for the Readings in the Royal Festival Hall will be on sale later this year.

The winner of the 2023 Prize will be announced at the Award Ceremony on Monday 15 January 2024, where the winner and the shortlisted poets will be presented with their cheques. 

For full information on this year’s judges, visit our judges page on the T. S. Eliot Prize website.

The T. S. Eliot Prize was founded in 1993, and the inaugural winner was Ciaran Carson for his collection First Language (Gallery Press). A full list of all the winners can be found in the Previous Prizes section of the T. S. Eliot Prize website.