{"id":9399,"date":"2005-03-01T16:23:37","date_gmt":"2005-03-01T16:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tse.spyrosntanos.com\/?p=9399"},"modified":"2025-06-13T10:38:35","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T09:38:35","slug":"george-szirtes-wins-the-t-s-eliot-prize-2004","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/george-szirtes-wins-the-t-s-eliot-prize-2004\/","title":{"rendered":"George Szirtes wins the T. S. Eliot Prize 2004"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published in the <\/i>Poetry Book<\/i> Society’<\/em><\/a>s <\/em>PBS Bulletin in Winter 2004\/5.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"\u2018Off to London soon to make whoopee. Well, to read three or four poems and make something: conversation mostly.\u2019 George Szirtes\u2019 website diary entry for the night before the T. S. Eliot Prize 2004 award ceremony is characteristically modest and amusing. Reporting his own win the next day, however, the blog style becomes beguilingly enthusiastic and full of surprise. The result came as no surprise of course to the judges of this year\u2019s Prize, for whom Reel <\/em>was a clear favourite. The book is \u2018a brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of dislocations and betrayals of history\u2019 reported Douglas Dunn, announcing the winner. Professor Dunn, who chaired the judging panel, added \u2018the judges were impressed by the unusual degree of formal pressure exerted by Szirtes on his themes of memory and the impossibility of forgetting\u2019.<\/p>\n

Guests at the ceremony in London included three former Eliot Prize winners (Michael Longley, Don Paterson and Hugo Wiliams), entire anthologies of poets, their friends, publishers and promoters. All cheered as a stunned and smiling Szirtes was presented with a cheque for \u00a310,000 by Mrs Valerie Eliot, T. S. Eliot\u2019s widow. Mrs Eliot has generously supported the Prize since it was founded in 1993, overseeing its development to the point where it\u2019s described today as \u2018poetry\u2019s equivalent of the Booker Prize\u2019 (Daisy Goodwin).<\/p>\n

News of Geroge\u2019s win was reported thoroughly by the UK media \u2013 and on TV in Germany, Italy, Spain, India and his native Hungary, a generous tribute to a poet whose Eliot Prize win was popular and well-deserved.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published in the Poetry Book Society’s PBS Bulletin in Winter 2004\/5.   \u2018Off to London soon to make whoopee. Well, to read three or four poems and make something: conversation mostly.\u2019 George Szirtes\u2019 website diary entry for the night before the T. S. Eliot Prize […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":10138,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[109,39],"class_list":["post-9399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-109","tag-winner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9399","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=9399"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10585,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9399\/revisions\/10585"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}