This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published on the Poetry Book Society website in 2007.
The Poetry Book Society is pleased to announce that the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize for the best single-author collection of poetry published in 2006 is:
Seamus Heaney, for his collection District and Circle
After several hours of deliberation and much lively debate, the judges of the 2006 prize, Sean O’Brien, Sophie Hannah and Gwyneth Lewis, reached a consensus. The winner was announced at an award ceremony in central London last night, where Catherine Heaney, Seamus’s daughter, accepted a cheque for £10,000 on his behalf from T. S. Eliot’s widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot. Now in its thirteenth year, the T. S. Eliot Prize is poetry’s most coveted award.
Sean O’Brien said, Chair of the judges, said:
Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle is a commanding, exhilarating work. In an outstandingly strong field, this was an exceptional collection of poems.
On hearing that he had won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2006, Seamus Heaney said:
There are many reasons to feel honoured by the award of this prize – the aura of T. S. Eliot’s name, for a start; the distinction of the previous winners; the quality of the other poets on this year’s shortlist; and the high regard in which the judges are held. When I called one of the poems in District and Circle ‘Anything Can Happen’ I wasn’t thinking that anything like this would happen to the book, but it certainly expresses what I’m feeling at the moment.
District and Circle is Seamus Heaney’s twelfth collection of poems. The sonnet sequence which gives the collection its name harks back to a summer in the early Sixties when Heaney spent rush hours travelling to work on the District and Circle underground lines. In fact, much of the book refers back to the past, but it is a past overshadowed and intercut by the threats and uncertainties of the present. Thus a US fireman’s helmet, given as a gift twenty years previously, takes on new meaning; an old-fashioned turnip-snedder becomes a metaphor for unflinching brutality; that descent into the Underground carries barely hidden menace. However, this dark forboding is offset by joyfully spry verses in which Heaney evokes the happy ghosts of eminent writers who have gone before him.
Anahorish 1944
We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.
A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood
Outside the slaughterhouse. From the main road
They would have heard the squealing,
Then heard it stop and had a view of us
In our gloves and aprons coming down the hill.
Two lines of them, guns on their shoulders, marching.
Armoured cars and tanks and open jeeps.
Sunburnt hands and arms. Unknown, unnamed,
Hosting for Normandy.
Not that we knew then
Where they were headed, standing there like youngsters
As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.
© Seamus Heaney, from the collection District and Circle, published 2006 by Faber and Faber. By kind permission.
The T. S. Eliot Prize 2006 shortlist was:
Simon Armitage – Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (Faber & Faber)
Paul Farley – Tramp in Flames (Picador Poetry)
Seamus Heaney – District and Circle (Faber & Faber)
W. N. Herbert – Bad Shaman Blues (Bloodaxe Books)
Jane Hirshfield – After (Bloodaxe Books)
Tim Liardet – The Blood Choir (Seren)
Paul Muldoon – Horse Latitudes (Faber & Faber)
Robin Robertson – Swithering (Picador Poetry)
Penelope Shuttle – Redgrove’s Wife (Bloodaxe Books)
Hugo Williams – Dear Room (Faber & Faber)
The T. S. Eliot Prize is sponsored by the broadcaster Five.
This article has been republished to provide a fuller picture of the T. S. Eliot Prize history. The Poetry Book Society ran the T. S. Eliot Prize until 2016, when the T. S. Eliot Foundation took over the Prize, the estate having supported it since its inception.
