Hannah Sullivan has been named the winner of the 2018 TS Eliot Prize.
She picked up the £25,000 prize for her debut collection, Three Poems, which was described by the judges as “astonishing”.
Sinead Morrissey, who was this year’s Chair of the Judges, said that the collection “[challenges] the parameters of what poetry can do.”
“Her collection stood out even amongst this year’s outstanding and diverse shortlist. Rarely has such a significant poet arrived so fully-formed,” she said.
Morrissey, who won the TS Eliot Prize herself in 2013, announced the winner at a special ceremony at the Wallace Collection. It followed from a night of readings at the Southbank Centre, where all ten poets read from their work in the Royal Festival Hall.
Sullivan’s collection consists of three long-form poems that manage to feel both epic and intimate, with youth, motherhood, death and philosophy among in its themes.
She also works as a Professor of English at the University of Oxford, where she has won awards for her academic research into modernist approaches to literary style.
Of the ten collections shortlisted for this year’s prize, five were for debuts; as well as Sullivan, these were Richard Scott’s Soho, Zaffar Kunial’s Us, Fiona Moore’s The Distal Point and Phoebe Power’s Shrines of Upper Austria.
Also shortlisted were Nick Laird’s Feel Free, Sean O’Brien’s Europa, Tracy K Smith’s Wade in the Water, Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin and Ailbhe Darcy’s Insistence.
Each shortlisted poet receives £1,500 in recognition for their achievement. This, as well as the winner’s prize money, is award by the TS Eliot Foundation.
Sullivan’s win marks the second year in a row that a debut collection has won the prize; last year it went to Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong for his first collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds.
