T. S. Eliot Prize winners: (top row, from left) Ocean Vuong, Michael Longley, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Sarah Howe, Don Paterson; (second row) Bhanu Kapil, Ted Hughes, Sean O’Brien, Sharon Olds, Roger Robinson, Alice Oswald, Philip Gross; (third row) Joelle Taylor, Anthony Joseph, John Burnside, Les Murray, Hannah Sullivan, Jen Hadfield; (fourth row) Mark Doty, Ciaran Carson, Derek Walcott, Jacob Polley, Anne Carson, Hugo Williams, George Szirtes, Sinéad Morrissey, David Harsent.
From gathering a ‘hot and overwrought multitude […] into the dining room of the Chelsea Arts Club’, to staging the UK’s largest annual poetry event, the T. S. Eliot Prize has grown significantly since its inauguration in 1993. It is now widely regarded as the world’s most prestigious prize for poetry, with winners that include Poet Laureates and Nobel Prize winners alongside newly emerging authors. Poets from the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia and the Caribbean have all featured.
Chris Holifield, whose connection with the Prize spans two decades, chronicles its 30-year history and growth in a new article for the T. S. Eliot Prize website. She charts who won, when and where, spotlighting exciting moments in the Prize’s history (as well as the occasional difficulty to be overcome). A personal highlight for Chris? ‘Visiting Valerie Eliot in the rather grand Kensington flat she had shared with her husband to take copies of the shortlist, and thank her for supporting the Prize’, she writes.
Read Chris Holifield’s history of the T. S. Eliot Prize in full.