Allen-Paisant wins 2023 T S Eliot Prize

In the UK, Jason Allen-Paisant has won the 2023 T S Eliot Prize, worth £25,000 (A$47,773), for his collection Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet Press), reports the Bookseller.

Self-Portrait as Othello was chosen as the winner from a shortlist of 10. Prize judges Paul Muldoon, Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul described the work as ‘a book with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair’.

‘As the title would suggest, the poetry is delivered with theatricality and in a range of voices and registers, across geographies and eras,’ said the judges. ‘It takes real nerve to pull off a work like this with such style and integrity. We are confident that Self-Portrait as Othello is a book to which readers will return for many years.’

Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and academic living in the UK. He has previously won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for his collection Thinking with Trees (Carcanet Press) and has a nonfiction book titled Scanning the Bush (Hutchinson Heinemann) forthcoming this year. Self-Portrait as Othello has also been shortlisted in the poetry category of 2024 Writers’ Prize.

Accepting the prize, Allen-Paisant said that he was ‘preoccupied over the last few months about the situation that is taking place in Gaza’. ‘This is not articulate as I hadn’t thought this out, but I just want to say, to bring the situation into the room, and to urge us as poets, as creatives, as thinkers, to use our voices, our platforms, our influences, to denounce what I think is a tragedy of historic proportions, the slaughter, the genocide, that is currently happening.’

The award is the most valuable prize in British poetry and is the only poetry prize that is judged purely by established poets. Last year’s winner was Anthony Joseph for his collection Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury).

Category: International news