Jason Allen-Paisant, a Jamaican poet, has been awarded the TS Eliot Prize for his collection of poems, Self-Portrait as Othello. The prize, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, carries a cash award of £25,000. The judges praised the work’s “nerve, style and integrity”, which they felt would attract readers for many years to come. Self-Portrait as Othello draws on Shakespeare’s play of the same name to explore the life of a black, male immigrant, searching for his identity and a role model.
Allen-Paisant is a critical theory and creative writing tutor at the University of Manchester. He won the poetry category of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2022, for his first collection, Thinking with Trees. Past winners of the TS Eliot Prize include Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes.
This year’s shortlist of 10 poets was chosen from 186 submissions by publishers in the UK, Ireland, the US and Hong Kong. The authors included Joe Carrick-Varty for More Sky, Jane Clarke for A Change in the Air, Katie Farris for Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, Kit Fan for The Ink Cloud Reader, Ishion Hutchinson for School of Instructions, Fran Lock for Hyena!, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain for The Map of the World, Sharon Olds for Balladz and Abigail Parry for I Think We’re Alone Now.
The shortlisted poets read their works in full to a live audience at the Royal Festival Hall in London as part of the UK’s largest annual poetry event. They all received a £1,500 cheque in recognition of being shortlisted. Last year’s winner of the TS Eliot Prize was Anthony Joseph, a British-Trinidadian poet and novelist, for his autobiographical collection, Sonnets for Albert
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