Philip Gross’ Water Table wins TS Eliot Prize

He may be little known outside the poetry world, but university lecturer Philip Gross has won this year’s TS Eliot prize for his poetry collection about the Bristol Channel.

Gross’s The Water Table beat off competition from better-known poets to take the £15,000 prize, the largest in UK poetry, at this evening’s award ceremony in London.

He joins an illustrious group of former winners, including Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney (2006), and Alice Oswald (2002), who was also on the shortlist this year.

Simon Armitage, chair of the judging panel, perhaps revealed the thinking behind their choice when he said at tonight’s event: “We seem to have found room on the shortlist for both well established poets and poets whose work lies outside mainstream recognition, and for that we have congratulated ourselves.”

Armitage said that ”through his patient and metaphysical work” Gross had created ”substantial and powerful poems for the real world.”

Cheers filled the Wallace Collection Hall as Gross collected his cheque from Valerie Eliot, but some were talking afterwards about the person who dropped a glass in apparent shock at the decision.

In his acceptance speech Gross praised the nominees: “We didn’t quite succeed in the reading [at Queen Elizabeth Hall] last night – I think we very nearly did – in making the task for the judges impossible by each of us being so excellently what we are that we became literally incomparable.”

He then read “one of the only poems in the collection that has no water in it”, Dead Letterbox, but had to start again because he had the wrong glasses.

“Poets are completely at ease with doing more than one draft of a poem,” he joked.

Gross, 57, is a professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University, and has published novels as well as several collections of poetry. 

Neil Astley, the editor and founder of Gross’s publishers, Bloodaxe Books said: “I feel it’s long deserved recognition. We’ve published five books of his, and he’s never really had the recognition his work deserves. But finally this year he’s won a prize.”

Bloodaxe, who have now won the TS Eliot prize two years in a row, will reprint The Water Table next week.

Astley added: “Just being shortlisted for the prize raises your profile and sales immediately, and winning it really makes a big difference … it makes a big difference to poets who are not generally known outside poetry circles.”