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). 

Les Murray won the T. S. Eliot Prize 1996 with Subhuman Redneck Poems (Carcanet), judged by Andrew Motion (Chair), Helen Dunmore and Ruth Padel.

Sadly, Les Murray died on 29 April 2019, aged 80, so we asked Michael Schmidt, Les Murray’s publisher at Carcanet, to reflect on Les’s win.

Michael wrote:

Subhuman Redneck Poems was a title I baulked at when Les Murray sent me the script of his book. It still seems to me to overplay one suit when he holds the whole pack of cards in his hand. He was a common man, a redneck, but at the same time an uncommon one in his learning, his grace, his sheer variety of interest, experience and feeling. Subhuman Redneck Poems was written with his left hand while his right was busy composing the verse novel Fredy Neptune. It proved that his amazing lyric gift could not be staunched even by that vast narrative, not to say epic, endeavour.
          Derek Walcott declared, ‘There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational.’ That is true. His books were dedicated to the glory of God because the incarnation sanctified the whole material world to which God-made-man committed himself. Our world. Us. The humble folk of the holy land and the humble folk of the outback broke and shared the same bread. To glorify God, his natural and human world deserve enactment and witness, and this extraordinary book enacts and witnesses.
          Les writes an elegy for his father that is tender, harrowing, candid, forgiving. Here Murray sees and feels, in the changes in his country and its people and the changes in the larger world, the changes in himself and his family, how time passing deepens the imagination. Poetry is a way of witnessing at once to continuities and to alterations, a way of preserving, accepting, warning. And praying. A quite amazing book. It is one of those choices which one feels might have appealed to T. S. Eliot himself. I’m sorry, Tom: Les is a Carcanet poet.

Les Murray (1938-2019) grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales. He studied at Sydney University and later worked as a translator at the Australian National University and as an officer in the Prime Minister’s Department. Carcanet publish his Collected Poems and his New Selected Poems (2012), as well as his individual collections, including Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), The Biplane Houses (2006), and his essays and prose writings in The Paperbark Tree (1992). His last collection, Continuous Creation: Last Poems, was published in 2022. Murray’s verse novel Fredy Neptune appeared in 1998 and in 2004 won the Mondello Prize in Italy and a major German award at the Leipzig Book Fair. He also edited The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001-2010. In 1999 Murray was awarded The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

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.

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

When Sinéad Morrissey won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2013 with her collection Parallax (Carcanet), Ian Duhig, who chaired a judging panel which also included Imtiaz Dharker and Vicki Feaver, said: ‘Politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.’

We asked Sinéad to reflect on her experiences of the Prize – for which she had been shortlisted several times. She wrote:

I first became aware of the T. S. Eliot Prize when Anne Carson won with The Beauty of the Husband in January 2002. I knew she’d won because she gave a lecture at the Southbank Centre later that year, on Sappho, and fragments, and gaps, which had blown my mind almost as much as The Beauty of the Husband itself. The Battle of Borodino, Ray, the wine press, all the lights on in the house – I’d never read a collection like it. The lecture that followed was called the T. S. Eliot Prize Lecture. ‘Slide, please’, Anne Carson kept saying, tipping her head up at the black box at the back of the auditorium where the technicians lived, and I knew I was in the presence of genius.
          The Prize played a major role in my life over the course of the next decade. While I was at that same festival, news came through that my second collection, Between Here and There, had just been shortlisted. I was astonished. At the ceremony, grateful to even be in the room, I drank grapefruit juice out of long glasses and felt incredibly relaxed. ‘Who do you think should win?’ asked Michael Longley, Chair of the judges, as we coincided on the stairs. ‘Alice Oswald,’ I answered, ‘for Dart. It’s the best book on the list.’
          Two more shortlistings for my two subsequent collections followed. The readings were intense. Then the ceremonies. Not winning the T. S. Eliot Prize was becoming routine. At the awards event in January 2014, shortlisted for my fifth collection, Parallax, I was backing my way into a plant pot, trying to pre-empt recurring disappointment, when Ian Duhig began his speech.
          I was welcomed back in Belfast with a handmade laurel wreath by my dear poet-friend, Jean Bleakney, and an impromptu party. Though it’s a decade ago now – inexorably, another ten years has passed – and though winning is never a given, but rather an extraordinary stroke of brightly-coloured luck – being awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize changed my life.

Sinéad Morrissey’s awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), first prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times Poetry Now Award (2009, 2013), the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate (2013-14) and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. (Sinéad Morrissey photo by Florian Braakman.)

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.

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).

When Anne Carson won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2001 with The Beauty of the Husband (Cape Poetry) she was the first woman to be awarded the prize. The book, which charts the breakdown of a marriage in 29 ‘tangos’, was described as ‘tart, lyrical, erotic, plain-spoken and highly charged’ by Chair Helen Dunmore who judged the prize with John Burnside and Maurice Riordan. It was Carson’s third consecutive nomination (she would later be shortlisted for Red Doc>).

We asked Anne what she remembered of the experience. She wrote:

My only memory of the T. S. Eliot Prize event is of arriving at my hotel (on Gower Street as I recall) to be told I had no room reservation and therefore no room. Searching about on his computer, however, the desk clerk found an available space ‘at the back under the stairs’, which he referred to as ‘the maid’s room’, and where I eventually parked myself and my suitcase. Quite a small room. However with one window, looking out on a sort of back garden. That night I couldn’t sleep and spent some hours lying on my back staring out the one window. A moonless night so nothing much to see. Suddenly through the utter blackness came the sound of a blackbird. The T. S. Eliot Prize gave me the gift of a blackbird singing in the dead of night and I have been grateful ever since. Though it was Paul McCartney who wrote ‘Blackbird’ (as several people later told me), I like to think Eliot got the idea from John Lennon, the two of them chumming around together, in Heaven.   

Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honours include the T. S. Eliot Prize, a Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Prize, on two occasions, fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature 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.