This article on the early years of the T. S. Eliot Prize was written and added to the website in 2025.

The winner of T. S. Eliot Prize 1997 was Don Paterson for his collection God’s Gift to Women (Faber & Faber). He was presented with the £5,000 prize, the generous gift of Mrs Valerie Eliot, at the Award Ceremony at the British Library, London, on 19 January 1998.

The judges Gillian Clarke (Chair), Sean O’Brien and Hugo Williams chose Paterson’s collection from a submission of 77 titles and a shortlist of ten books:

Fleur Adcock – Looking Back (OUP / Oxford Poetry)

Gillian Allnutt – Nantucket and the Angel (Bloodaxe Books)

Helen Dunmore – Bestiary (Bloodaxe Books)

Selima Hill – Violet (Bloodaxe Books)

Jamie McKendrick – The Marble Fly (OUP / Oxford Poetry)

Don Paterson – God’s Gift to Women (Faber & Faber)

Peter Reading – Work in Regress (Bloodaxe Books)

Matthew Sweeney – The Bridal Suite (Cape Poetry)

Derek Walcott – The Bounty (Faber & Faber)

John Hartley Williams – Canada (Bloodaxe Books)

This article, compiled from contemporary reports, has been published to provide a fuller picture of the T. S. Eliot Prize history.

The T. S. Eliot Prize was inaugurated by the Poetry Book Society in 1993 to mark the Poetry Book Society’s fortieth birthday, and to honour its founding poet. The T. S. Eliot estate has provided the prize money since the Prize’s inception, and the T. S. Eliot Foundation took over the running of the Prize in 2016, following Inpress Books’ acquisition of the PBS.