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 1995 was Mark Doty for his collection My Alexandria (Cape Poetry), his first collection to be published in the UK; he was also the first American poet to win the Prize. Doty was awarded £5,000, the generous gift of Mrs Valerie Eliot, at an event at the Polish Hearth Club, London, on 15 January 1996.
The judges were James Fenton (Chair), Maura Dooley and Liz Lochhead. James Fenton wrote:
Now those who succeed in bringing something good out of all these griefs, those who emerge after the explosion, as it were, holding the eggs unbroken, they do something special on all our behalf. They seem to become our representatives. They speak for us. And while nobody could have been more specific than Mark Doty in conjuring up his world, his version of Bohemia, his Alexandria, nevertheless it was our experience as judges that we continually recognised our own experience in his. I find it hard to recall a collection of poems that has evoked such an immediate, heartfelt, powerful response from those who have had the luck to read it.
Doty’s collection was chosen from a shortlist of ten books:
Simon Armitage – The Dead Sea Poems (Faber & Faber)
Mark Doty – My Alexandria (Cape Poetry)
Ian Duhig – The Mersey Goldfish (Bloodaxe Books)
Michael Longley – The Ghost Orchid (Cape Poetry)
Glyn Maxwell – Rest for the Wicked (Bloodaxe Books)
Bernard O’Donoghue – Gunpowder (Chatto & Windus)
Katherine Pierpoint – Truffle Beds (Faber & Faber)
Maurice Riordan – A Word from the Loki (Faber & Faber)
Jackie Wills – Powder Tower (Arc Poetry)
Glyn Wright – Could Have Been Funny (Spike)
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.
