T. S. Eliot Prize 30th Anniversary

2009 WINNER PHILIP GROSS ON THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE’S ‘FLASH OF BRIGHT ATTENTION’

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).

Philip Gross won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2009 for The Water Table (Bloodaxe Books), chosen by judges Simon Armitage (Chair), Colette Bryce and Penelope Shuttle. Armitage described it as ‘a mature and determined book, dream-like in places, but dealing ultimately with real questions of human existence’.

We asked Philip to reflect on his experience of winning the Prize. He wrote:

The best thing that the T. S. Eliot Prize experience did for me was… it surprised me. Utterly. The Water Table had come into the world without particular notice in the places I might have hoped for. I’d been philosophical. Would I trust the way the poetry was leading me, even in the face of scant encouragement? Yes, it seemed that I would. Then the TSE surprise came as an affirmation of that.
          And equally, somehow, it also seemed to free me, not to bind me in the way success can sometimes do. It came with no expectation that I had to try to do the same again. My following book, Deep Field, was outwardly quite different – only I might see the underground streams that link them – but it had the courage to be itself, and so have quite a few more books since then. I thank the Eliot Prize for that, and hope it will never lose that quality of unpredictability – not a routine landmark for the usual suspects, but sometimes a flash of bright attention that lights up a collection’s true quality, maybe even in a way that takes the author by surprise.

Philip Gross was born in Cornwall, the son of an Estonian wartime refugee. He has lived in Plymouth, Bristol and South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His twenty-seventh collection, The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe Books), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. Philip regularly collaborates with other artists, photographers and writers; he also writes poetry for young people – The All-Nite Café won the Signal Award 1994, and Off Road to Everywhere won the CLPE Award 2011. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. (Philip Gross photo by Stephen Morris.)

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.

RECALIBRATION AND CHANGE: BHANU KAPIL ON WINNING THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2020

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In 2023 the T. S. Eliot Prize celebrates 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).

Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020, judged by Lavinia Greenlaw (Chair), Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan. ‘Our shortlist celebrated the ways in which poetry is responding to profound change,’ Lavinia Greenlaw said. ‘From this impressive field, we unanimously chose Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart as our winner. It is a radical and arresting collection that recalibrates what it’s possible for poetry to achieve.’ 

We asked Bhanu to reflect on winning the T. S. Eliot Prize. She wrote:

The night I won the T. S. Eliot Prize, I was at home, about to microwave a plate of Indian food, when a friend texted: ‘Congratulations!’ She’d forwarded to the end of the Prize Readings video, something I had not done, precisely because it had not occurred to me to do so. I was so shocked. At that time, it was still the pandemic, and as a carer of an older parent, I was cautious about travel or spending time indoors in groups. Or perhaps the live Readings had been cancelled? And that’s why I was making dinner in my pyjamas, ready to celebrate whoever it was who was about to win? I will never forget the visceral surprise.
          The next morning, I made a red ice heart, like the one I’d created for the ICA performance the book was inspired by, and which I describe in the notes that come at the end of the poems. Then, I placed it in the fresh snow outside my door, to melt. That day, I felt a sense of freedom and possibility, recalling the deep wish I’d had, to write something that could bring me back to the UK after so long in the United States. It’s that wish that manifested as a book, in the first place, thanks to Deryn Rees-Jones and Pavilion Poetry. But publishing a book of poetry does not always mean it will be widely read, in the way that one hopes for or imagines. Sometimes a book is like a stone thrown into the water. It sinks to the bottom, and many years pass before it’s picked up, or read again. That, in fact, had been my experience with all my previous books, all published by small presses in the US. But now, this very specific dream, of writing something that might be read in my birthplace, in one sitting, by many people, had come spectacularly true.
          The experience led to many gates swinging open. I went through them, these cultural gates, but it took some time to feel the congruence between the writer that I am when I am writing in a notebook, and this other writer, the one who’s won a prize. Winning the Eliot Prize was protection, a shield, and it really helped me to re-establish my life in the UK. The money helped immensely, but it was this radical incongruence, of abruptly being or becoming a writer who’d won a prize, that led to great change. I think it has changed the way I write: towards what, and for whom.
          The exhibition Esta Luz, Tóxica (II Movimiento), a collaboration with Giulia Cenci, Georgina Hill and Jonás De Murías, is an example of a curation that the book has flowed into and through, in ways that I don’t think the book could have done without the visibility of the Prize.

Bhanu Kapil is the author of five books of poetry/prose: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), the newly reissued Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), and Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015). She was the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry 2020.

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 MARKER IN THE CALENDAR: 2007 WINNER SEAN O’BRIEN ON 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). 

Sean O’Brien won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2007 with The Drowned Book (Picador Poetry), a collection described as ‘fierce, funny and deeply melancholy’ by Peter Porter, the Chair of judges in a panel that also included W. N. Herbert and Sujata Bhatt. He has been shortlisted on four other occasions: for Europa in 2018, The Beautiful Librarians in 2015, November in 2011 and Downriver in 2001. He was also a judge in 1997 and 2006.

We asked Sean to reflect on his win and his experiences of the Prize, which date back to the inaugural award presented to Ciaran Carson in 1993. He wrote:

It seems long ago, the first time I went to the T. S. Eliot prizegiving. This was in the days before there was a public reading the previous evening. The event took place at the Chelsea Arts Club in London and the late Ciaran Carson won. I remember spotting Stephen Spender, a great attender and conferencier, one of the last links with the gone world of Auden, MacNeice and the poetry of the 1930s. I ‘saw him plain’ but did not speak with him, for some reason, shyness perhaps.
          Years later I was a judge when Seamus Heaney won. He’d been ill and couldn’t attend, and the prize was accepted on his behalf by his daughter Catherine. Next morning on Today on BBC Radio 4 John Humphrys asked why Heaney wasn’t more angry. Weren’t poets supposed to be angry? Seamus fielded this with his usual grace. When Humphrys turned to me I pointed out that courtesy had a significant place in Heaney’s work. ‘The end of art is peace’, as he put it in ‘The Harvest Bow’.
          Heaney could also laugh at himself. A few years earlier, he broke off from conversation at the prizegiving so that he could be photographed. He sat down and assumed an expression of statesmanlike neutrality. Afterwards he explained: ‘If I smile and then win the prize, the photograph reads: “Heaney smug”. If I look serious and don’t win, it’s “Heaney glum”.’
          The Eliot result is supposed to be embargoed until the award is made, though that’s quite a big word, so perhaps not everyone understands it. The year I received the prize it was not until after the event that my partner told me that earlier on at the hotel, while I was in the shower, there’d been a phone call from the literary editor of one of the newspapers congratulating me. Gerry kept this to herself, for which I’m very grateful.
          Has the T. S. Eliot Prize changed? Obviously it’s become a public event, a marker in the calendar, rather than something largely of interest to poets and publishers. I think the founding principle was to draw attention to contemporary poetry. Large audiences attend the Readings at the Royal Festival Hall, and there is comment in the media on the merits of the shortlisted books. As to the award party, it’s not the Met Ball, but I did once enjoy listening to two female friends of mine discussing, several months in advance, what outfits they ought to wear for the occasion. This is some distance from the Velcro carpet in the struggling arts centre or the lecture room where the organiser of tonight’s reading is nowhere to be found.
          Is this an improvement? In some respects, undoubtedly. But it may be worth reflecting that the T. S. Eliot Prize began before the internet and social media became the frame in which so much experience is viewed and judged and blathered about. As we all know, courtesy and proportion are not the obvious strong suits of a world driven by electronic addiction and prey to rancour, paranoia, tribalism and the rest. At times traces of this have been noticeable at the Royal Festival Hall readings, which is a shame and a distraction from the art of poetry itself, without which nobody would be there in the first place.

Sean O’Brien’s poetry has received numerous awards, including the Forward Prize (three times), the E.M. Forster Award and the Roehampton Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems (Picador Poetry) appeared in 2012 and his latest collection, Embark (Picador Poetry), was published in 2022. His pamphlet Impasse: for Jules Maigret was published by Hercules Editions in 2023. Sean O’Brien’s work has been published in several languages. His novel Once Again Assembled Here (Picador) was published in 2016. He is also a critic, editor, translator, playwright and broadcaster. Born in London, he grew up in Hull. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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.