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T S Eliot Prize Preview 2012

The T S Eliot Prize is awarded annually by the Poetry Book Society for the best new collection of poetry. Each year, the Poetry School organises an event where an Eliot Prize judge or distinguished poet provides an overview of the year’s ten shortlisted books, paying close attention to individual poems and inviting comment and debate from the audience. It’s the perfect warm up to the Shortlist readings at the Royal Festival Hall in the evening. This year's host is Jane Draycott. Eliot-shortlisted in 2009 for her collection, Over, Jane's latest book is a new translation of the 14th century dream-vision Pearl (Carcanet, 2011), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Jane's regular Saturday classes at the Poetry School always sell out - we know she'll host a lively and detailed discussion of this year's Shortlisted collections.

Bookings will be handled through the South Bank's website at http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/ - as soon tickets are available, we will let you know.

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Jane Draycott

Jane Draycott is a UK-based poet with a particular interest in sound art and collaborative work. Her latest collection Over was published in April by Carcanet/OxfordPoets and is currently shortlisted for the 2009 T S Eliot Prize. Nominated three times for the Forward Prize for Poetry, her first two full collections Prince Rupert's Drop and The Night Tree (Carcanet/Oxford) were both Poetry Society Recommendations. Other collections include, from Two Rivers Press, Christina the Astonishing (with Peter Hay and Lesley Saunders) and Tideway, a long sequence of poems about London's working river (with paintings by Peter Hay) written while poet-in-residence at the River & Rowing Museum.

Her audio work with Elizabeth James has won several awards including BBC Radio 3 Poem-for-Radio and a London Sound Art Award. Winner of the Keats Shelley Poetry Prize in 2002 and nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets in 2004, she was a Stephen Spender Prize-winner in 2008 and teaches on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.

Her contemporary version of the medieval dream-vision Pearl is forthcoming in 2010 from Carcanet/OxfordPoets and is supported by Arts Council England South East.

I've waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline. In fact 'The Night Tree' is the finest collection I've read for ages. - David Morley, The Guardian

Those who enjoyed Jane Draycott's 'Tideway' poems...will know how well she evokes the otherness of the underwater river-world... and it is in this sense that the word 'quiet' should be applied to the chords and modulations of Draycott's eerie and beautiful poems. She listens, and therefore so do we. - Sean O'Brien, The Guardian