Dr Jason Allen-Paisant wins the T. S. Eliot Prize
Dr Jason Allen-Paisant (2011) has won the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize for his collection of poems Self-Portrait As Othello. The collection of poems reimagines Shakespeare’s eponymous hero in a modern landscape, examining “the missing backstory of Othello” and drawing parallels to the lives of Black male immigrants in Europe today.
Jason Allen-Paisant is a senior lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He was born in Jamaica and came to the UK in 2011 to read for a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages at Merton College. He had been writing poetry since he was an undergraduate, but at Oxford, he says, “something shifted and I started doing it seriously”.
Published by Carcanet Press, Self-Portrait as Othello is Jason Allen-Paisant’s second collection. It won the 2023 Forward prize for best collection and has been shortlisted for the Writers’ prize, the award previously known as the Rathbones Folio prize. Dr Allen-Paisant’s first poetry collection, Thinking With Trees, was published in 2021 and his first non-fiction book, The Possibility of Tenderness, will be published in 2025.
The judging panel, made up of the poets Paul Muldoon, Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul, called the collection, "a book with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair." They stated, "As the title would suggest, the poetry is delivered with theatricality and in a range of voices and registers, across geographies and eras. It takes real nerve to pull off a work like this with such style and integrity. We are confident that 'Self-Portrait as Othello' is a book to which readers will return for many years."
Dr Allen-Paisant says about winning this award,
“The T. S. Eliot Prize is the most coveted award in poetry and I feel enormously privileged to be this year's winner. I recognise this as a high water mark that will transform my career and life, going forward. I'm very pleased by the warm felicitations extended by the Warden and by the Merton community as a whole. It was while at Merton that I began to embrace the idea that I might be a poet, and the environment provided endless opportunities - in the form of both people and material resources - through which I nurtured my craft. It was at Merton that I first delved into Eliot's Four Quartets, reading it almost obsessively and sharing Eliot's poetry back and forth with like-minded members of the MCR. As I recall now - while writing these lines - that Eliot himself was a Mertonian, I'm overwhelmed by the thought that things are coming full circle. What I'm trying to say is that my poetry as it is today would not have existed without the Merton experience, and it therefore feels special to share this moment with the College.”
The T. S. Eliot Prize was inaugurated in 1993 to celebrate the Poetry Book Society’s 40th birthday. It is awarded annually to the author of the best new collection of poetry published in the UK and Ireland. Previous winners include Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, former poet laureate Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald, and Carol Ann Duffy.
