Jacob Polley wins 2016 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry

Poet Jacob Polley on 16 January 2017 won the 2016 T.S. Eliot prize for his collection, 'Jackself.' The award ceremony was organised at the Wallace Collection Gallery in London.

Polley is the 23rd winner of the prestigious USD 24000 award.

Jackself is a sequence of narrative poems partly inspired by his childhood in Cumbria, England. The book was chosen from a 10-strong shortlist that included Measures of Expatriation by Vahni Capildeo, winner of the 2015 Forward prize, and Falling Awake by Alice Oswald, previous T S Eliot prize winner.

Ruth Padel, one of the judges of the panel, stated that Jackself was "a firework of a book; inventive, exciting and outstanding in its imaginative range and depth of feeling."

The coveted award was founded by T.S. Eliot's widow Valerie in 1993. T.S. Eliot was one of the 20th century's major poets.

About Jacob Polley

• Jacob Polley is an English poet from United Kingdom.

• His first four books of poems are The Brink, Little Gods, The Havocs and Jackself.

• Born in 1975, he obtained his masters in Creative Writing from Lancaster University in 1997.

• In 2002, he won an Eric Gregory Award and the BBC Radio 4/Arts Council ‘First Verse’ Award.

• His first book, The Brink, was shortlisted for the 2003 T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys prize.

• His first novel titled Talk of the Town was published in June 2009. The book won the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award.

• His third poetry book, The Havocs, won the 2012 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for the T.S. Eliot Prize.