Muldoon to chair 2023 T S Eliot Prize

Paul Muldoon will be chairing the judging panel for the 30th T S Eliot Prize, alongside Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul.

The winning poet will receive a cheque for £25,000 and the shortlisted poets will be presented with cheques for £1,500.

Muldoon is a former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, and has taught at Princeton University for 35 years. He is the author of 14 collections of poetry, most recently Howdie-Skelp. He won the 1994 T S Eliot Prize, its second year, for his collection The Annals of Chile, and was also shortlisted for Hay, Moy Sand and Gravel, and Horse Latitudes, all published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux and Faber.

Muldoon’s other awards include the 1972 Eric Gregory Award, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize and the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, among others.

He said: "It’s an honour to chair the T S Eliot Prize as it celebrates 30 years of excellence in poetry. I look forward to reading numerous collections, discovering remarkable new voices and rediscovering familiar ones, as I work alongside my distinguished fellow judges Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul."

Dugdale is a poet and translator who has published five collections with Carcanet. Deformations, her most recent collection, was shortlisted for the 2020 T S Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her previous collection, Joy, was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and the title poem was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of 2016. She has published numerous translations of Russian women’s writing, with the most recent of these, Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo), being shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Meanwhile, Saul’s debut collection The Room Between Us (Pavilion Poetry) was shortlisted for the 2022 T S Eliot Prize, longlisted for the 2022 Jhalak Prize, and was a 2022 Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation. She is the author of two pamphlets: White Narcissi (flipped eye) and House of Blue (Rack Press).

Michael Sims, director of the T S Eliot Prize, said: "We are delighted to be celebrating three decades of the T S Eliot Prize. Every year since its inauguration, the aim of the prize has been to pick the best original book of poems in English, published within the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Over the course of 30 remarkable years this laudable aim has not wavered."

The call for submissions will go out in June, with the submission window closing at the end of July. The 2023 T S Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings will take place on Sunday 14th January 2024 in the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall as part of its literature programme.

The winner will be announced at the award ceremony on Monday 15th January 2024, where the winner and the shortlisted poets will be presented with their cheques. Last year’s winner was Anthony Joseph for his collection, Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury Poetry), and the panel was chaired by Jean Sprackland, judging alongside Hannah Lowe and Roger Robinson.