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When Sin\u00e9ad Morrissey won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2013 with her collection Parallax<\/em> (Carcanet)<\/strong>, Ian Duhig, who chaired a judging panel which also included Imtiaz Dharker and Vicki Feaver, said: \u2018Politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.\u2019<\/p>\n We asked Sin\u00e9ad to reflect on her experiences of the Prize \u2013 for which she had been shortlisted several times. She wrote:<\/p>\n I first became aware of the T. S. Eliot Prize when Anne Carson won with <\/em>The Beauty of the Husband in January 2002. I knew she\u2019d won because she gave a lecture at the Southbank Centre later that year, on Sappho, and fragments, and gaps, which had blown my mind almost as much as <\/em>The Beauty of the Husband itself. The Battle of Borodino, Ray, the wine press, all the lights on in the house \u2013 I\u2019d never read a collection like it. The lecture that followed was called the T. S. Eliot Prize Lecture. \u2018Slide, please\u2019,<\/em> Anne Carson kept saying, tipping her head up at the black box at the back of the auditorium where the technicians lived, and I knew I was in the presence of genius. Sin\u00e9ad Morrissey<\/strong>\u2019s awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), first prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times<\/em> Poetry Now Award (2009, 2013), the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate (2013-14) and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. (Sin\u00e9ad Morrissey photo by Florian Braakman.)<\/em><\/p>\n The T. S. Eliot Prize celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2023<\/strong>. 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\u2019s 40th birthday and to honour its founding poet. The T. S. Eliot Estate has provided the prize money since the Prize\u2019s 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<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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). When Sin\u00e9ad Morrissey won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2013 with her collection Parallax (Carcanet), Ian Duhig, who chaired a judging […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":4925,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,50,36],"tags":[49,39],"class_list":["post-2778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","category-tse30","category-news","tag-anniversary","tag-winner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2778"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10632,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778\/revisions\/10632"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The Prize played a major role in my life over the course of the next decade. While I was at that same festival, news came through that my second collection, <\/em>Between Here and There, <\/em>had just been shortlisted. I was astonished. At the ceremony, grateful to even be in the room, I drank grapefruit juice out of long glasses and felt incredibly relaxed. \u2018Who do you think should win?\u2019 asked Michael Longley, Chair of the judges, as we coincided on the stairs. \u2018Alice Oswald,\u2019 I answered, \u2018for<\/em> Dart.<\/em> It\u2019s the best book on the list.\u2019
\n<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Two more shortlistings for my two subsequent collections followed. The readings were intense. Then the ceremonies. Not winning the T. S. Eliot Prize was becoming routine. At the awards event in January 2014, shortlisted for my fifth collection, <\/em>Parallax,<\/em> I was backing my way into a plant pot, trying to pre-empt recurring disappointment, when Ian Duhig began his speech.
\n<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I was welcomed back in Belfast with a handmade laurel wreath by my dear poet-friend, Jean Bleakney, and an impromptu party. Though it\u2019s a decade ago now \u2013 inexorably, another ten years has passed \u2013 and though winning is never a given, but rather an extraordinary stroke of brightly-coloured luck \u2013 being awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize changed my life.<\/em><\/p>\nAbout the T. S. Eliot Prize<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n