T S Eliot Prize 2013


The Poetry Book Society is delighted to announce the judges for the 2013 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Ian Duhig will be Chair and the other two judges will be poets Vicki Feaver and Imtiaz Dharker.

The judges will meet in October to decide on the ten-book shortlist. The four Poetry Book Society Choices from 2013 are automatically shortlisted for the Prize.

The Spring 2013 Choice was Bad Machine by George Szirtes (Bloodaxe) and the Summer Choice will be Drysalter by Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape).

They will be joined on the shortlist by the PBS Autumn Choice, to be announced shortly, and the Winter Choice, which will be announced in August.

The T S Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings will take place on Sunday 12 January 2014 in the Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall. The Readings for the 2012 Prize attracted 250 more people than the previous year and the Readings continue to be the largest annual poetry event in the UK.

The winner of the 2013 Prize will be announced at the award ceremony on Monday 13 January 2014, where the winner will be presented with a cheque for £15,000, donated by the T S Eliot Trustees, following on in the tradition of Mrs Valerie Eliot, who generously gave the prize money from the inception of the Prize. The shortlisted poets will each receive £1,000.

The T S Eliot Prize Reading Groups scheme will enable reading groups and individual readers to read the shortlist. Specially commissioned reading group notes, together with three poems from each shortlisted collection, will be made available to download from the PBS website. The scheme will target both poetry reading groups and fiction book groups.

Last year's winner was Sharon Olds for her collection Stag's Leap (Jonathan Cape). The judges were Carol Ann Duffy (Chair), Michael Longley and David Morley.

The T S Eliot Prize was inaugurated in 1993 to celebrate the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday, and to honour its founding poet. The T S Eliot Prize is the 'world's top poetry award' (Louise Jury, The Irish Independent). The Prize is awarded annually to the writer of the best new poetry collection published in the UK or Ireland. It is unique as it is always judged by a panel of established poets and it has been described by Sir Andrew Motion as 'the Prize most poets want to win'.

Previous winners (in chronological order) are: Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Mark Doty, Les Murray, Don Paterson, Ted Hughes, Hugo Williams, Michael Longley, Anne Carson, Alice Oswald, Don Paterson (for the second time), George Szirtes, Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Sean O'Brien, Jen Hadfield, Philip Gross, Derek Walcott, John Burnside and Sharon Olds.

The Prize is generously supported by the T S Eliot Estate.

This year marks the third year of generous three-year support from Aurum, a private investment management firm which manages funds for charities, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and private individuals, and which supports a range of charities <http://www.aurum.com/charities.aspx>.