David Harsent wins 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry

This year’s T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry has been awarded to David Harsent for his collection Fire Songs. Published by Faber, it is Harsent’s eleventh collection to date, his fifth to be nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize and his first to win. The poet claims a prize of £20,000 – an increase of £5,000 from the usual £15,000 in honour of the 50th anniversary of Eliot’s death (bet Sinéad Morrissey wishes she’d held off on publishing for just a few more months).

Helen Dunmore, chair of this year’s judging panel for the prize, says of the book ‘Fire Songs plumbs language and emotion with technical brilliance and prophetic power,’ and describes Harsent as ‘a poet for dark and dangerous days.’

Harsent took the prize over nine other nominees, who each take £1,500 apiece for making the shortlist: Fiona Benson’s Bright Travellers, John Burnside’s All One Breath, Louise Glück’s Faithful and Virtuous Night, Michael Longley’s The Stairwell, Ruth Padel’s Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth, Pascale Petit’s Fauverie, Kevin Powers’ Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, Arundhathi Subramaniam’s When God is a Traveller and Hugo Williams’ I Knew the Bride.

Though a first time winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, Harsent is a prior recipient of the Forward Prize (in 2005 for Legion, having been shortlisted another three times) and the Griffin Poetry Prize (in 2012 for Night). He was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton in 2013, is also an author of crime fiction under the pseudonyms Jack Curtis and David Lawrence, and has written for TV shows including Midsomer Murders, Holby City and The Bill. He is probably the only recipient of the T. S. Eliot Prize to have done the latter.

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