T S Eliot Prize for Poetry - winner announced
The Poetry Book Society has just announced the winner of the 2006 Prize at
the award ceremony in London and it is Seamus Heaney for his collection
District and Circle, published by Faber and Faber.
The prize money of £10,000 is given by the widow of the poet, Mrs Valerie
Eliot, and the Prize is sponsored by the broadcaster Five
The judges (Chair Sean O'Brien, Sophie Hannah and Gwyneth Lewis) had a
difficult task deciding amongst the extremely strong shortlist of ten
collections published during 2006.
Seamus Heaney is one of the leading poets of his generation.
He has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for
The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). In 1995 he was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has never won the T S Eliot Prize,
widely regarded as the top UK poetry prize.
District and Circle is his twelfth collection
of poems. As well as being shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize it was also
shortlisted for the 2006 Forward Prize and was a Poetry Book Society
Choice.
The shortlist comprised Seamus Heaney; Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer
Prize winner and previous winner of the Eliot; Simon Armitage,
well-known to school students and winner of one of the first Forward
Prizes; American poet Jane Hirshfield, who is celebrated in the US but
publishing only her second book in the UK; W N Herbert, author of the
long and exuberant Bad Shaman Blues; Paul Farley, whose second
collection, The Ice Age, won the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2002; Tim
Liardet, whose collection is about working in the largest Young Offenders'
Institution in Europe; Penelope Shuttle, whose collection is about the
loss of her husband the poet Peter Redgrove; Hugo Williams, who won the
Eliot in 1999; and Robin Robertson, winner of this year's Forward Prize.
Announcement on
www.poetrybookshoponline.com