Michael Longley is one of 10 poets to have been shortlisted for the 2014 TS Eliot Prize, which was won last year by fellow Northern poet Sinéad Morrissey for her collection Parallax.
Longley (75) has been shortlisted for The Stairwell (Jonathan Cape), of which John McAuliffe wrote in his Irish Times review in August: "Michael Longley's readers will love the lyrical annotations of wild places and the quick articulate raids on the classics of his new collection. Eight years and two collections after his Collected Poems ended by declaring, "I am writing too much about Carrigskeewaun", he is still uncovering new reasons to return [to Mayo,] his "home-from-home-land".
The Belfast poet, who was Professor of Poetry for Ireland from 2007 to 2010, previously won the TS Eliot Prize in 2000 for The Weather in Japan, which also won the Hawthornden Prize and the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry. In 1991, his Gorse Fires won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. A Hundred Doors won the Poetry Now Award in September 2012.
The others on the shortlist are:
Fiona Benson - Bright Travellers (Jonathan Cape)
John Burnside - All One Breath (Jonathan Cape)
Louise Glück - Faithful and Virtuous Night (Carcanet)
David Harsent - Fire Songs (Faber)
Ruth Padel - Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth (Chatto & Windus)
Pascale Petit - Fauverie (Seren)
Kevin Powers - Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting (Sceptre)
Arundhathi Subramaniam - When God is a Traveller (Bloodaxe)
Hugo Williams - I Knew the Bride (Faber)
To mark the 50th anniversary of T S Eliot’s death on January 4th, 2015, the T S Eliot Estate has increased the value of the prize named in his honour to £20,000, while the shortlisted poets will each receive £1,500.
Chairwoman of the judges Helen Dunmore said: “After reading more than a hundred poetry collections the three judges for this year’s T S Eliot Prize were delighted - and excited - by the quality of the work submitted. Our shortlist reflects the musicality, mastery and ambition of these ten chosen poets. It’s worth saying that while our discussions were searching, our decisions were in all cases unanimous. As one judge said when we surveyed the pile of shortlisted books at the end of our meeting: ‘This is a box-set I’d love to have’.”
The T S Eliot Prize Readings, the largest annual poetry event in the UK, will take place on Sunday, January 11th, 2015 in London’s Royal Festival Hall. The winner of the 2014 Prize will be announced the next day.
