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).


Don Paterson is the only poet to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize twice: in 1997 for God’s Gift to Women and in 2003 for Landing Light (both published by Faber & Faber). In commending Landing Light, Chair of judges George Szirtes said: ‘[Don Paterson] offers what Eliot demanded: complexity and intensity of emotion, an intuitive understanding of tradition and what it makes possible, and, at the same time, a freshness that is like clear spring water. His work is superbly authoritative, deeply felt, playful and properly ambitious.’

We asked Don to reflect on his experience as an Eliot Prize winner. He wrote:

As they say in cybernetics, the purpose of a system is what it does. How might the POSIWID rule apply to prize system? Sure, prizes reward, however capriciously, or unfairly, or incommensurately, or strangely. But what they also do, consistently, is make authors very self-conscious, especially in regard to what they might do next. Prizes will ‘bring things out in you’. In my case, winning the Eliot for God’s Gift to Women let me take myself seriously as a poet, which was a good thing, as I was at the time in danger of putting less important things – or at least things I was less good at, but found more enjoyable – before poetry. Winning it again for Landing Light left me in danger of taking myself too seriously altogether. Initially, I probably did. But the other thing prizes like the Eliot bring you is critical attention. This is always good, for all it may not feel that way at the time. I recall a pretty brutal review by Robert Potts titled ‘None More Black’; the title references Nigel Tufnell’s famous remark on how much more black the cover of Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove album could have been. Even I could laugh. And on the strength of it, I decided I should maybe stop thinking of the poem as a kind of light-subtraction gun. 
     Prizes acquaint you with your luck, not your talent, which only the decades will confirm. (At least ‘thinking you deserve it’ isn’t an option for recovering Calvinists. If a tenner on a scratchcard feels like a smack in the face, a prize is like being hit by a truck.) You shouldn’t forget that your book has been the beneficiary of a literary fashion; it would’ve fallen foul of another. But I remain overwhelmingly grateful that I was fortunate enough to be disrupted in whatever path I was taking. A path without disruption is mostly likely one which, in the end, only you have any interest in pursuing. There are always better ones, but you won’t find them without the instruction to stop and take a long look at the map, or without someone asking ‘I see you’ve travelled some way; but where the hell are you going?

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. As well as the T. S. Eliot Prize, his poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and all three Forward Prizes. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews and, for over twenty-five years, was Poetry Editor at Picador. He also works as a jazz musician.

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. The 2023 shortlist will be announced in September and the 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.

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