The T. S. Eliot Foundation is delighted to announce that this year’s winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2017 is Ocean Vuong for his remarkable debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, published by Cape Poetry.
After months of reading and deliberation, Judges W. N. Herbert (Chair), James Lasdun and Helen Mort chose the winner from a strong Shortlist of four women and six men.
Chair W. N. Herbert said:
Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds deals with the aftermath of war and migration over three generations. It is a compellingly assured debut, the definitive arrival of a significant voice.
W. N. Herbert formally announced that Ocean Vuong was the winner at the T. S. Eliot Prize Award Ceremony in the Wallace Collection on Monday 15 January. The winner was presented with a cheque for £25,000 and each shortlisted poet received a cheque for £1,500 in recognition of their achievement in winning a place on the most prestigious shortlist in UK poetry.
The award ceremony was preceded by the T. S. Eliot Prize Readings on Sunday 14 January, held in the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. All ten poets read to a packed-out audience in a remarkable display of the strength and range of British poetry.
To mark the 25th anniversary of the Prize, the T. S. Eliot Foundation has increased the prize money to £25,000, with the shortlisted poets each receiving £1,500, making it the richest prize in British poetry.
To further boost the Prize and promote the shortlisted poets, the anniversary has also been the first year in which the Foundation has commissioned new high quality video recordings of the shortlisted poets reading their work and talking about it, a remarkable body of work with 40 videos available on YouTube and the T. S. Eliot Prize website.
The 25th anniversary has also been marked by the announcement today of a new collaboration between the T. S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Archive. From 2018 the T. S. Eliot Prize Winners’ Archive will present a celebration of 25 years of the Prize and going forward each winner will be inducted into the Archive, so that their voice will be preserved and made available for posterity online.
In a fantastic display of support for poetry and to mark the 25th anniversary of the prize, Royal Mail will also be issuing a special postmark congratulating this year’s winner. The postmark will be applied to the majority of stamped mail that the company delivers every day to over 30 million addresses across the UK over three days, a wonderful boost for poetry.
