Allen-Paisant wins T S Eliot Prize

Jason Allen-Paisant has won the £25,000 T S Eliot Prize 2023 with Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet Press), which last year also scooped the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

The judges – chair Paul Muldoon, Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul – described Self-Portrait as Othello as "a book with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair".

They said: "As the title would suggest, the poetry is delivered with theatricality and in a range of voices and registers, across geographies and eras. 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 who works as a senior lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and lives in Leeds. His previous collection Thinking with Trees (also Carcanet) won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry. A non-fiction book, Scanning the Bush, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann later this year. 

The award was presented on Monday 15th January at a ceremony at the Wallace Collection in London. Allen-Paisant was visibly emotional when accepting the award, and read some selected poems for the audience.

Before he exited the stage, he explained how, as a poet, he was "preoccupied over the last few months about the situation that is taking place in Gaza". He said: "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."

Each of the poets shortlisted for the award, who include previous T S Eliot Prize winner Sharon Olds, receives £1,500. 

Last year’s T S Eliot Prize winner was Anthony Joseph for his collection Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury).