Seamus Heaney wins the T S Eliot Prize 2006

The Poetry Book Society is pleased to announce that the winner of the T S Eliot Prize for the best single-author collection of poetry published in 2006 is:

Seamus Heaney, for his collection District and Circle

Mrs Valerie Eliot with Seamus Heaney's daughter, Catherine Heaney, and David Lammy, the Minister for Culture at the T S Eliot Prize 2006 Award Ceremony

After several hours of deliberation and much lively debate, the judges of the 2006 prize, Sean O’Brien, Sophie Hannah and Gwyneth Lewis, reached a consensus. The winner was announced at an award ceremony in central London last night, where Catherine Heaney, Seamus’s daughter, accepted a cheque for £10,000 on his behalf from T S Eliot’s widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot. Now in its thirteenth year, the T S Eliot Prize is poetry’s most coveted award.

Sean O’Brien said, chair of the judges, said:

“Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle is a commanding, exhilarating work. In an outstandingly strong field, this was an exceptional collection of poems.”

On hearing that he had won the T S Eliot Prize 2006, Seamus Heaney said:

“There are many reasons to feel honoured by the award of this prize – the aura of T S Eliot’s name, for a start; the distinction of the previous winners; the quality of the other poets on this year’s shortlist; and the high regard in which the judges are held. When I called one of the poems in District and Circle ‘Anything Can Happen’ I wasn’t thinking that anything like this would happen to the book, but it certainly expresses what I’m feeling at the moment.”

District and Circle is Seamus Heaney’s twelfth collection of poems. The sonnet sequence which gives the collection its name harks back to a summer in the early Sixties when Heaney spent rush hours travelling to work on the District and Circle underground lines. In fact, much of the book refers back to the past, but it is a past overshadowed and intercut by the threats and uncertainties of the present. Thus a US fireman’s helmet, given as a gift twenty years previously, takes on new meaning; an old-fashioned turnip-snedder becomes a metaphor for unflinching brutality; that descent into the Underground carries barely hidden menace. However, this dark forboding is offset by joyfully spry verses in which Heaney evokes the happy ghosts of eminent writers who have gone before him.

Sample poem from District and Circle:

Anahorish 1944

‘We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.

A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood

Outside the slaughterhouse. From the main road

They would have heard the squealing,

Then heard it stop and had a view of us

In our gloves and aprons coming down the hill.

Two lines of them, guns on their shoulders, marching.

Armoured cars and tanks and open jeeps.

Sunburnt hands and arms. Unknown, unnamed,

Hosting for Normandy.

Not that we knew then

Where they were headed, standing there like youngsters

As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.’

© Seamus Heaney, from the collection District and Circle, published 2006 by Faber and Faber. By kind permission.

The T S Eliot Prize 2006 shortlist was:

Each of these collections are available from www.poetrybookshoponline.com.

To find out more about the T S Eliot Prize click here.

The T S Eliot Prize is sponsored by the broadcaster