2002
T. S. Eliot Prize
Winner
Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), received a Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. Her collections include Dart, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2002 and was a Poetry Book Society Choice; Woods etc. (which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize); A Sleepwalk on the Severn (which won the Hawthornden Prize), Weeds and Wildflowers, illustrated by Jessica Greenman (the inaugural winner of the Ted Hughes Award) and Memorial (which won the 2013 Warwick Prize for Writing), a reworking of Homer’s Iliad that has received high critical praise for its innovative approach and stunning imagery, all published by Faber & Faber. Falling Awake (Cape Poetry) was published in 2016 and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize for Best Collection and was the winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2016.
Since then, she has published Nobody (Cape Poetry, 2019) and with Paul Keegan co-edited Gigantic Cinema (Cape Poetry and W. W. Norton), an anthology of writing about the weather. In June 2017, she was awarded the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and from 2019 to 2023 she was the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Author photo © Kate Mount
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
Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. His collections...
John Burnside was an internationally celebrated poet, novelist, memoirist, writer of short stories and academic works, and the...
Paul Farley was born in Liverpool and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He has published six...
David Harsent has published numerous collections of poetry, including Legion (Faber & Faber, 2005), which won the Forward...
Sir Geoffrey William Hill, FRSL was a poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director...
E. A. Markham (1939-2008) had a career that embraced the range of literary life, and more. Aside from...
Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She read English and German at Trinity...
Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio...
Ruth Padel has published thirteen poetry collections, numerous books of non-fiction including two much-loved books on reading contemporary...
Judges
CHAIR
Michael Longley, born in Belfast on 27 July 1939, was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and...
Related News Stories
This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published on the Poetry Book Society website in 2003. The Poetry Book Society and Prize sponsors www.bol.com are pleased to announce the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, awarded to the best collection of poetry published in 2002. Judges...
This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published on the Poetry Book Society website in 2002. The Poetry Book Society and Prize sponsors www.bol.com are pleased to announce the Shortlist for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2002, to be awarded to the best collection of poetry published...
