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).
Judges John Burnside (Chair), Sarah Howe and Nick Makoha were unanimous in choosing Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree Press) as the winner of of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2019 – a book that, they agreed, ‘finds in the bitterness of everyday experience continuing evidence of “sweet, sweet life”.’
Reflecting on his win, Roger wrote:
The T. S. Eliot Prize became such a positive inflection point in my career, boosting my confidence and my reception in the literary world. It enabled me to work with producers and companies that I’d not had access to previously, and its influence allowed me to further support younger black writers in their journey, which is of great importance to me.
Roger Robinson’s poetry pamphlet Suckle (flipped eye, 2009) won the People’s Book Prize and the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize. His debut collection, The Butterfly Hotel (Peepal Tree Press, 2013), was shortlisted for The OCM Bocas Poetry Prize and his second full collection, A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree Press, 2019), won the the Ondaatje Prize as well as the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize. His recent collaboration with photographer Johny Pitts, Home is Not a Place (William Collins) was shortlisted for The British Book Awards 2023 Discover Book of the Year. Roger is an alumni of The Complete Works and was a co-founder of both Spoke Lab and the international writing collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. rogerrobinsononline.com
About the T. S. Eliot Prize
The T. S. Eliot Prize celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2023. Awarded annually to the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland, the Prize was founded by the Poetry Book Society in 1993 to celebrate the PBS’s 40th birthday and to honour its founding poet. The T. S. Eliot Estate has provided the prize money since the Prize’s inception in 1993, and the T. S. Eliot Foundation took over the running of the Prize following the acquisition of the PBS by InPress Books in 2016. For more on the history of the Prize, visit tseliot.com/prize
