In 2023 the T. S. Eliot Prize celebrated its 30th anniversary. We marked the occasion by looking back at the collections which have won ‘the Prize poets most want to win’ (Sir Andrew Motion).
When David Harsent won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2014 for Fire Songs (Faber & Faber), Helen Dunmore, who chaired a judging panel that also included Sean Borodale and Fiona Sampson, described him as ‘a poet for dark and dangerous days’. Fire Songs, she said, ‘plumbs language and emotion with technical brilliance and prophetic power.’
We asked David to reflect on his experience as an Eliot Prize winner and judge. He wrote:
Having judged the prize, having been four times shortlisted, and having won it with Fire Songs, I am very aware of the responsibilities, the disappointments and the elation that are part of the T. S. Eliot Prize for those most closely involved. No less important is the wide influence and high reputation attached to the Prize as a means of drawing attention to the art of poetry at a time when few people read and fewer read poetry; at a time when poetry remains crucial as a means of interpreting the world.
David Harsent has published thirteen collections of poetry. Legion won the 2005 Forward Prize for Poetry. Night (2011), a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the Costa, Forward and T. S. Eliot poetry prizes and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent collection, Loss, was published in 2020. (David Harsent photo © Simon Harsent)
About the T. S. Eliot Prize
The T. S. Eliot Prize celebrated 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. The T. S. Eliot Estate has provided the prize money since the Prize’s inception in 1993, and the T. S. Eliot Foundation took over the running of the Prize following the acquisition of the PBS by InPress Books in 2016. For more on the history of the Prize, visit tseliot.com/prize
