1997
T. S. Eliot Prize
Winner
Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, aphorism, criticism and poetic theory. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, and three Forward Prizes; he is the only poet to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions – with his second collection God's Gift to Women (Faber & Faber, 1997) and Landing Light (Faber & Faber, 2003). He also been shortlisted for Nil Nil (1993) and 40 Sonnets (2015). His most recent collections are Zonal (2020) and The Arctic (2022). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews and for twenty-five years was Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. He is a Fellow of the English Association, the Royal Society of Literature, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010.
This biography of Don Paterson is taken from the Faber & Faber website.
www.donpaterson.net
Faber & Faber
Announcements
Introduction
The T. S. Eliot Prize is awarded annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland. Described by Sir Andrew Motion as ‘the prize poets most want to win’ and by The Independent as the ‘world’s top poetry award’, it is the most prestigious poetry prize in the world, and the only major poetry prize judged purely by established poets.
Announcements
Introduction
The T. S. Eliot Prize is awarded annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland. Described by Sir Andrew Motion as ‘the prize poets most want to win’ and by The Independent as the ‘world’s top poetry award’, it is the most prestigious poetry prize in the world, and the only major poetry prize judged purely by established poets.
Announcements
Shortlisted Works
Shortlisted Poets
Gillian Allnutt was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. Nantucket and the...
Fleur Adcock (1934-2024) was born in New Zealand in 1934. She spent the war years in England, returning...
Helen Dunmore (1952-2017) was a poet, novelist, short story and children’s writer. Her poetry books received a Poetry...
Born in Hampstead in 1945 into a family of painters, Selima Hill now lives on the Dorset coast....
Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He is author of eight collections of poetry and has...
Peter Reading (1946-2011) was born in Liverpool. After studying painting at Liverpool College of Art, he worked as...
Matthew Sweeney (1952-2018) was born in Lifford, Co. Donegal, Ireland. He moved to London in 1973 and studied...
Born in St Lucia, in the West Indies, in 1930, Derek Walcott studied at the University College of...
John Hartley Williams (1942-2014) published four collections with Bloodaxe (all now out of print) after making his debut...
Judges
CHAIR
Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke is a poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator (from Welsh). She edited the Anglo-Welsh...
Related News Stories
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). Don Paterson is the only poet to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize twice: in...
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 1997 was Don Paterson for his collection God’s Gift to Women (Faber & Faber). He was presented with the £5,000 prize,...
