In 2023 the T. S. Eliot Prize celebrates its 30th anniversary. We’re marking the occasion by looking back at the collections which have won ‘the Prize poets most want to win’ (Sir Andrew Motion).
Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber) proved a publishing sensation and the T. S. Eliot Prize 1998 was just one of the major prizes that it won. Bernard O’Donoghue, Chair of the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize panel, which also included Simon Armitage and Maura Dooley, said ‘the towering presence of Hughes’s accomplished, powerful and utterly cohesive collection could not be overlooked. It is a truly great book.’
Ted Hughes died in 1998, just a few months after the publication of Birthday Letters. We asked the poet Christopher Reid, Hughes’s editor at Faber, to reflect on the book’s publication.
He wrote:
A year or two before I received the typescript of Birthday Letters, I was on the phone to Ted Hughes. The last decade of Ted’s life was exceptionally productive, even for him, encompassing as it did the publication of such books as Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Winter Pollen, Difficulties of a Bridegroom and Tales from Ovid, and I count myself lucky to have been his editor for most of that period. I don’t remember which book had necessitated the phone call, but at the end of our business discussion Ted, as he was apt to do, threw in an extra, off-topic titbit: he’d been writing, he told me, some poems addressed to Sylvia Plath. Naturally, I blurted out that I’d very much like to see them, my publisher’s crass pouncing instinct probably all too audible down the line. No, they weren’t ready for publication, he said; and when he explained his reasons for withholding them – mainly consideration for the feelings of his family – I doubted I should see them any time soon, if ever.
The existence of poems addressed to Plath came as no surprise: ‘You Hated Spain’, in which the ‘You’ could have been nobody but his first wife, had been slipped, between the poems of Crow and those of Cave Birds, into Hughes’s Selected Poems 1957–1981; and the New Selected Poems of 1995 included more than half a dozen among those arranged under the heading ‘Uncollected’. But I could have had no idea of the number of such poems he had written, nor of the patient and purposeful way in which they had accumulated to form the collection that was eventually placed in my hands, before being published a few months later, on 1 January 1998.
‘Placed in my hands’ is not merely a figurative turn of phrase. Ted had a strong sense of ceremony, or ritual, when it came to delivering his typescripts, so he drove up to London with various copies for distribution among the Faber personnel. I happened to be off duty on that particular day, but he found his way to my house in north London and made the presentation there in my front room. Taking possession was already a charged affair, but I was overawed when I understood what the collection was, and my awe only increased when I read it, as I did immediately from beginning to end. Matthew Evans, Faber’s managing director, whose guidance Ted always sought, decided that the book should be published as quickly as possible and without the customary publicity fanfare. This in itself generated conspiratorial excitement throughout the firm, all of us strictly enjoined to keep mum, and it certainly sharpened my concentration as I set about composing the editorial notes that were needed. It must also have put the wind up Ted, who was in the incorrigible habit of adjusting and altering his texts, sometimes making radical changes, often without editorial sanction, until the very last moment. Still, it was all managed happily, and Birthday Letters duly exploded on the world with a resonance that can be heard even now.
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber & Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters. He was Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.
Christopher Reid‘s The Late Sun was published by Faber & Faber in 2020.
ABOUT THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE
The T. S. Eliot Prize celebrates 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. It has been run by The T. S. Eliot Foundation since 2016. For more on the history of the Prize, visit tseliot.com/prize
The judges of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2023 are Paul Muldoon (Chair), Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul. Submissions are now open and will close at the end of July. The 2023 Shortlist Readings will be held on 14 January 2024 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall; tickets will go on sale later this year. The winner of the 2023 Prize will be announced at the Award Ceremony on 15 January 2024.
Sign up to the T. S. Eliot Prize e-newsletter for regular updates about the award. It includes poems and specially commissioned video readings by our shortlisted poets, plus interviews, biographical information, reviews, Readers’ Notes, and news and offers from across the poetry world.
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. 
Les Murray (1938-2019) grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales. He studied at Sydney University and later worked as a translator at the Australian National University and as an officer in the Prime Minister’s Department. Carcanet publish his Collected Poems and his New Selected Poems (2012), as well as his individual collections, including Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), The Biplane Houses (2006), and his essays and prose writings in The Paperbark Tree (1992). His last collection, Continuous Creation: Last Poems, was published in 2022. Murray’s verse novel Fredy Neptune appeared in 1998 and in 2004 won the Mondello Prize in Italy and a major German award at the Leipzig Book Fair. He also edited The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001-2010. In 1999 Murray was awarded The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.