8 TS Eliot Prize winning poets to have appeared at the Southbank Centre

Awarded annually for the best collection of new verse in English published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland, it was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society’s 40th birthday, and named in honour of its founding poet.

First to be presented with the prize was Ciaran Carson for First Language: Poems, ahead of a shortlist that contained four other future winners; Carol Ann Duffy, Les Murray, Sharon Olds and Don Paterson. In total there have been 30 different winners of the prize and in actuality we could’ve included all of them in this piece as ahead of each year’s prize-giving the 10 shortlisted poets come together here at our Royal Festival Hall to give a reading from their collections, a tradition which continues in January 2026.

But to keep this list a little bit more digestible, we’ve disregarded those appearances and those at other poetry awards and prize-givings to look at a selection of eight former TS Eliot Poetry Prize winners who we’ve been fortunate enough to welcome again and again.

Typical. You wait ages for a Northern Ireland-born poet and member of the Belfast Group to win the TS Eliot Prize and then two come along at once; Paul Muldoon following Carson to lift the prize in 1994, its second year. Muldoon’s The Annals of Chile, his seventh collection, was praised by the judges for ‘the energy of his language, the hurtling force of his line and the seemingly effortless spontaneity of his invention’. The most recent of the poet’s many appearances at the Southbank Centre came in a different guise, as he joined Paul McCartney in conversation on our Royal Festival Hall stage in 2021 for the launch of the former Beatle’s book The Lyrics. More conventionally, Muldoon joined us at our 2015 London Literature Festival, where he read and discussed his poetry at an event you can revisit below.

Such is the calibre of our poetry events here at the Southbank Centre that you don’t have to look too far into our history to find appearances by TS Eliot Prize winners. In October 2024 the recipient of the 2002 award, Alice Oswald, joined us as part of a special event to celebrate 70 years of the National Poetry Library, having been named as one of the nation’s favourite poets. However the most notable Southbank Centre appearance by Oswald, who won the TS Eliot Prize for her second collection Dart, came in February 2012, when she wowed an audience with a 46 minute recital of her 71-page poem ‘Memorial’ from memory.

The prolific Carol Ann Duffy won the 2005 TS Eliot Prize for the 37th work of poetry, the intensely personal, Rapture. Four years on from the award, Duffy became the 20th Poet Laureate, a role she’d been hotly tipped for 10 years earlier when the position was given to Andrew Motion. It was as Poet Laureate that Duffy appeared here at the Southbank Centre as part of 2014’s Women of the World festival (below), and a special evening celebrating the first time that all five poet laureates (or equivalent roles) in the UK had been held by women. More recently Duffy returned here in 2018 for the London Literature Festival’s Carol Ann Duffy and friends, for which she was joined on stage by poets Imtiaz Dharker, Keith Hutson and Mark Pajak.

‘The poet of poets’ as author Malcolm Bradbury once described him, Seamus Heaney is, to date, the only Nobel Laureate in Literature to have won the TS Eliot Prize, picking up the latter of these two accolades in 2006 for District and Circle. Heaney’s appearances here at the Southbank Centre have been rich and varied, spanning from 1974’s Poetry International to a 2006 on-stage interview with Dennis O’Driscoll in our Queen Elizabeth Hall, via officially opening the National Poetry Library here in 1988 (pictured). In November 2013, following the poet’s death earlier that year, an evening of tribute to Heaney packed out our Royal Festival Hall and saw readings of his work from, among others, Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley and Edna O’Brien.

‘Politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests,’ explained chair of the 2013 TS Eliot Prize judges Ian Duhig, upon awarding the title to Sinéad Morrissey for Parallax. Later in 2014 the Northern Irish poet became the latest Belfast Poet Laureate, and it was in this role that she joined us, and Carol Ann Duffy, for that same special laureates night at 2014’s Women of the World festival.

If you want a marker of the prolificity and proficiency of Ocean Vuong, look no further than the fact that the still thirty-something writer has a separate Wikipedia page dedicated just to his many awards. Among them is the 2017 TS Eliot Prize, which he received for his ‘compellingly assured’ debut collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Little over a year later, Vuong was back at the Southbank Centre, and with another debut, this time his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous which he presented in our Purcell Room. His influence lives on in our programme, with the April 2025 London Sinfonietta concert Hidden Voices, featuring Hannah Kendall’s composition shouting forever into the receiver, which was inspired by a line in Vuong’s debut novel.

Taking nothing away from the other 29 poets to have been awarded the TS Eliot Prize, but there’s arguably not been a more popular winner of the award – certainly not in our buildings – than Joelle Taylor. A regular fixture here at the Southbank Centre, Taylor has been compere of the monthly spoken word and music night Out-Spoken since it took up residency in our Purcell Room in 2019. Since winning the 2021 TS Eliot Prize for her collection C*nto, Taylor’s presence in our venues has increased further still, including curation of the 2023 Koestler Arts exhibition IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, and, in February 2024, launching her debut novel The Night Alphabet with a staged reading in our Queen Elizabeth Hall. Here’s a video of Taylor reading an excerpt from C*nto in our Purcell Room for Out-Spoken in 2019.

‘Luminous’ is how the judges described Anthony Joseph’s Sonnets for Albert, winner of the 2022 TS Eliot Prize; ‘a collection which celebrates humanity in all its contradictions and breathes new life into this enduring form’. Like Taylor, Joseph will be familiar to those of you who have been regular attendees at Out-Spoken in recent years, but a decade before his win Joseph also joined us at the Southbank Centre as part of Poetry Parnassus, which featured over 150 poets, each representing a different nation. Joseph was flying the flag for Trinidad & Tobago, and during the festival gave this reading of ‘Buddha’ for us, in the National Poetry Library.