{"id":3183,"date":"2023-08-24T09:00:34","date_gmt":"2023-08-24T08:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/?p=3183"},"modified":"2025-06-13T11:39:42","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T10:39:42","slug":"donpatersonprize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/donpatersonprize\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I see you’ve travelled some way; but where the hell are you going?\u2019 \u2013 Don Paterson, a two-time winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, reflects on his experiences"},"content":{"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).<\/b><\/div>\n
\n

\"\"<\/strong>
\nDon Paterson is the only poet to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize twice: <\/strong>in 1997 for God\u2019s Gift to Women <\/em>and in 2003 for Landing Light<\/em> (both published by Faber & Faber). In commending Landing Light<\/em>, Chair of judges George Szirtes said: \u2018[Don Paterson] offers what Eliot demanded: complexity and intensity of emotion, an intuitive understanding of tradition and what it makes possible, and, at the same time, a freshness that is like clear spring water. His work is superbly authoritative, deeply felt, playful and properly ambitious.\u2019<\/p>\n

We asked Don to reflect on his experience as an Eliot Prize winner. He wrote:<\/p>\n

As they say in cybernetics, the purpose of a system is what it does. How might the POSIWID rule apply to prize system?\u00a0Sure, prizes<\/i>\u00a0reward, however capriciously, or unfairly, or incommensurately, or strangely. But what they also do, consistently, is make authors very self-conscious, especially in regard to what they might do next. Prizes will \u2018bring things out in you\u2019. In my case, winning the Eliot for\u00a0<\/i>God\u2019s Gift to Women\u00a0let me take myself seriously as a poet, which was a good thing, as I was at the time in danger of putting less important things \u2013 or at least things I was less good at, but found more enjoyable \u2013 before poetry. Winning it again for\u00a0<\/i>Landing Light left me in danger of taking myself too seriously altogether. Initially, I probably did. But the other thing prizes like the Eliot bring you is critical attention. This is always good, for all it may not feel that way at the time. I recall a pretty brutal review by Robert Potts titled \u2018None More Black\u2019; the title references Nigel Tufnell\u2019s famous remark on how much more black the cover of Spinal Tap\u2019s <\/i>Smell the Glove\u00a0album could have been. Even I could laugh. And on the strength of it, I decided I should maybe stop thinking of the poem as a kind of light-subtraction gun.\u00a0<\/i><\/div>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Prizes acquaint you with your luck, not your talent, which only the decades will confirm. (At least \u2018thinking you deserve it\u2019 isn\u2019t an option for recovering Calvinists. If a tenner on a scratchcard feels like a smack in the face, a prize is like being hit by a truck.) You shouldn\u2019t forget that your book has been the beneficiary of a literary fashion; it would\u2019ve fallen foul of another. But I remain overwhelmingly grateful that I was fortunate enough to be disrupted in whatever path I was taking. A path without disruption is mostly likely one which, in the end, only you have any interest in pursuing. There are always better ones, but you won\u2019t find them without the instruction to stop and take a long look at the map, or without someone asking \u2018I see you’ve travelled some way; but where the hell are you <\/i>going?<\/i><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Don Paterson<\/strong> was born in Dundee in 1963. As well as the T. S. Eliot Prize, his poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and all three Forward Prizes. He was awarded the Queen\u2019s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews and, for over twenty-five years, was Poetry Editor at\u00a0Picador. He also works as a jazz musician.<\/p>\n

\n

About the T. S. Eliot Prize<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

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\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<\/div>\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). Don Paterson is the only poet to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize twice: in 1997 for God\u2019s Gift to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":8865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,50,36],"tags":[49,39],"class_list":["post-3183","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\/3183","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=3183"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10620,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183\/revisions\/10620"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}