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:
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 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
