Eliot

‘Let’s see what the adjectives are,” says Jason Allen-Paisant – as if to make it even more obvious that he is a poet – when I ask how he’s feeling the morning after winning the TS Eliot prize for poetry. “Great. Overwhelmed. Ecstatic. Privileged.”Although you wouldn’t know it from his warmth and attentiveness, he is also very tired. The 43-year-old writer and academic couldn’t sleep properly after the ceremony, and ended up taking a walk through London in the early hours of the morning. “It’s not that I wasn’t expecting…

Jamaican poet Jason Allen-Paisant has won this year’s TS Eliot prize for Self-Portrait As Othello, his collection exploring Black masculinity and immigrant identity.Allen-Paisant was announced as the winner of the £25,000 award during a ceremony at the Wallace Collection in London.“Self-Portrait As Othello is a book with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair,” said the judging panel, made up of the poets Paul Muldoon, Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul.The book –…

Novelist, journalist and translator Mary Ann Evans, better known, of course, by her pen name George Eliot, is remembered primarily for Middlemarch, praised by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. Yet the Victorian writer wrote seven novels in total, as well as short stories and poems that deserve a look-in too – Eliot’s biographer Clare Carlisle suggests some good places to start.The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. Photograph: Wordsworth ClassicsThe one to make you laugh out…

Mid-Victorian society never forgave George Eliot for setting up home in 1854 with a rackety married man, the journalist and scientist GH Lewes. Late-Victorian society, by contrast, could not forgive her for choosing to wed in church when, following Lewes’s death in 1878, she walked up the aisle with a much younger and duller man called John Cross. On the question of marriage, George Eliot could never seem to get it right.In this thrilling book, the academic philosopher Clare Carlisle explores the novelist’s interrogation…

As a young man, Anthony Joseph dreamed of becoming a rock star, not a critically acclaimed poet. In fact, had it not been for a box of papers he brought to the UK from Trinidad, where he grew up, the 46-year-old might never have come to write Sonnets for Albert, the collection that on Monday won him this year’s TS Eliot prize.In the early 90s, the poet spent three years as the lead singer of Zedd, a “four-piece heavy Black rock band”. Shortly after Zedd disbanded, Joseph was unwell and stuck at home when he rediscovered…

Anthony Joseph has won the TS Eliot prize for his collection Sonnets for Albert, described as “luminous” by the judges.Joseph takes the £25,000 poetry prize, which this year saw a record 201 submissions.Chair of judges Jean Sprackland, who was joined on the panel by 2021 Costa book of the year winner Hannah Lowe and 2019 TS Eliot prize winner Roger Robinson, said each of the shortlisted books “spoke powerfully to us in its own distinctive voice”.“From this strong field our choice is Sonnets for Albert, a luminous…

Five debut collections are among the shortlist for this year’s TS Eliot prize for best new poetry collection, which saw a record number of submissions.Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Mark Pajak, James Conor Patterson, Denise Saul and Yomi Sode all make the list for the £25,000 prize.They are joined by Philip Gross, who won the prize in 2009, Fiona Benson, Jemma Borg, Anthony Joseph and Zaffar Kunial.Chair of judges Jean Sprackland said the shortlist consisted of books that “thrilled, surprised, and struck us to the…

Even if you flinch at the idea of a poem demanding a biography, an exception has to be made for The Waste Land. No other work of literature of the past century, or perhaps any century, feels quite so much a vivid breathing thing – ironically, since it is so consumed with death. Partly, crucially, that is the result of the extraordinary find in 1968 of all the drafts of Eliot’s poem in the Berg Collection of papers at the New York Public Library. Three years after the poet’s death, here were the living pages that made his…

Recently unveiled letters from TS Eliot to his muse Emily Hale show how much he loved his longtime friend, but a statement from beyond the grave by the poet himself dismisses his feelings and shows how Eliot tries to rewrite the narrative of their relationship, scholars say. Hale donated Eliot's letters to Princeton University Library more than 60 years ago with instructions that they could only be opened 50 years after she and Eliot died. The day they were made available at the Ivy League school, Eliot's…