T.S. Eliot Prize: Twitter Reax

David Harsent (seen above) walked away with this year's £20,000 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry collection Fire Songs. One of the three jurors for the competition was Fiona Sampson. The last major award Harsent won was the $75,000 Griffin Poetry Prize in 2012. On the jury for that year? Sampson. The TLS finds the coincidence troubling ("Isn’t this the sort of thing a journalist, even an arts journalist, ought to find curious?").

Others are far more pointed about it.

I am so indignant at not having a work colleague who will award me the T S Eliot Prize.
— david wheatley (@nemoloris) January 12, 2015

Maybe the best way to fix a prize (short of scuppering it) is create a better one.

I hereby announce the founding of The Miglior Fabbro Prize, to be awarded on the same day as the T.S. Eliot Prize next year to a book...
— Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod) January 14, 2015

...deemed to have shown the spirit of innovation and daring associated with Eliot's own verse. It will be worth £450, the same amount...
— Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod) January 14, 2015

...as Eliot was awarded by The Dial for The Waste Land. More details to follow.
— Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod) January 14, 2015

The Miglior Fabbro Prize will not be awarded at an expensive London -- or indeed, Norwich -- ceremony. It will however have a web presence..
— Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod) January 14, 2015

... more appropriate to a national prize for serious readers than the page currently maintained for the #TSEliotPrize http://t.co/ChUQilHKVE
— Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod) January 14, 2015

The prize shortlist will be compiled by open nomination. Statements of advocacy will be invited from readers with no personal connection...
— Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod) January 14, 2015

...to the poet nominated. The winning book will also be determined by an open online vote.
— Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod) January 14, 2015 

Rickman on Simic

Actor Alan Rickman reads poems from Bosnian-Canadian poet Goran Simic's book, Sprinting from the Graveyard (1997), translated by British poet David Harsent. The poems -- written during the seige of Sarajevo -- were retranslated by Simic himself in 2006 and published by Biblioasis under the new title Sarajevo With Sorrow. (Hat tip: Karen Shenfeld).