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). 

Ocean Vuong won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2017 with his debut collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Cape Poetry), a collection hailed by Chair of judges W. N. Herbert and fellow judges James Lasdun and Helen Mort, as ‘a compellingly assured debut, the definitive arrival of a significant voice’.

We asked Ocean to reflect on his win and his experiences of the Prize. He wrote:

Winning the T. S. Eliot Prize was an utter surprise, of course (most poets don’t expect to win anything!), but also because it was my first book, which in a way freed me to be more ambitious in my craft moving forward; it increased and amplified what I hoped my poems could do, what they dared for, giving me the courage to ask more out of them. A prize is only as esteemed as the challenge it puts on its winners: to meet, uphold, and hopefully surpass the standard for which one is awarded. Who knows if that is possible, for myself included, but the aspirational conditions are winds in one’s sail.

As well as winning the T. S. Eliot Prize, Ocean’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds won the Whiting Award and the Thom Gunn Award. His second collection Time Is a Mother (Cape Poetry, 2022) was a finalist for the Griffin prize. His debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Jonathan Cape, 2019) won the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, The New England Book Award and has since sold more than a million copies in 40 languages. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant, Ocean’s honours include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is a Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at New York University.

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