Derek Walcott takes home T.S. Eliot Prize
25th January 2011
Nobel laureate Derek Walcott has won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2010 with his collection White Egrets.
In winning the GBP 15,000 award, the 81-year-old triumphed over a shortlist that included well-respected works such as Seamus Heaney's Human Chain, Seeing Stars by Simon Armitage and Fiona Sampson's Rough Music.
Anne Stevenson, fellow poet and chair of the prize's judging panel, said it was difficult to choose a winner at first, but added that White Egrets is a 'moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet'.
'It took us not very long to decide that this collection was the yardstick by which all the others were to be measured,' the Guardian reports her as saying.
Past works by Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, include Omeros, The Prodigal and Tiepolo's Hound.
Collections by Annie Freud, John Haynes, Pascale Petit, Robin Robertson, Brian Turner and Sam Willetts were also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2010. All the nominees will receive GBP 1,000 each.
Last year, Philip Gross won the award for his 'mature and determined' collection The Water Table.