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 Michael Longley (Chair), Fred D’Aguiar and Deryn Rees-Jones named Alice Oswald’s Dart (Faber & Faber) as the winner of the £10,000 prize in an award ceremony held at Lancaster House in London on 20 January.

Dart is an extraordinary single poem, a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic – they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milkworker, a forseter, swimmers and canoeists – interwoven with historic and mythic voices: drowners and dreamers who act as markers along the way.

Michael Longley commented:

In the opinion of the Judges, Dart is a brilliant hybrid with a palpable coherence and individual signature. Its intermingling of poetry and prose feels natural, rhythmically inevitable. She brings in many voices and yet maintains a personal melody. This is a capacious, ambitious piece of work.

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.