Jamaican poet Jason Allen-Paisant wins T.S. Eliot prize for second poetry collection

Jamaican poet Jason Allen-Paisant has won the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, for his second collection of poems, ‘Self-Portrait As Othello.’

The book reimagines Shakespeare’s dark-skinned hero in a modern landscape, examining what Allen-Paisant calls “the missing backstory of Othello” and drawing parallels to the lives of Black male immigrants in Europe today.

“For many, many years I’ve been struck by how the play (‘Othello’) fails to imagine, shall we say, all that there could be to a character like Othello,” he explained after being shortlisted for the prize.

“If Othello was a foreigner to Venice, as the play says, where did he come from? How did he arrive there? What was his mother tongue? What was his background? The sort of questions that an author living in Othello’s type of skin would want to ask,” he said.

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Judges 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."

In a joint statement, they said: "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."

The 43-year-old writer and academic was visibly moved when he accepted the prize on Monday evening. He previously said winning the T.S. Eliot Prize “does change your life as a writer.”

"I'm only a little country boy from Jamaica. I've travelled far to get here," he told the BBC after his win, adding that he is the first person in his family to have attained A levels and gone to university.

"So when you consider that, there's nothing about this that is likely."

Archival gaps, invented stories

'Self-Portrait As Othello' contains several sonnets and prose poems. Allen-Paisant said he wanted to strike a balance between rigour and playfulness when it came to form. The first part of the book “is clearly written for performance,” he says.

In order to inhabit the skin of a Black man arriving in Venice during the Renaissance era, Allen-Paisant said he had to do a lot of research, during which he was confronted with an astounding lack of historical record.

“I spent a lot of time reading books about English travellers to Venice in the 16th and 17th centuries, (...) reading articles around Africans living in Venice in the Renaissance era,” he said.

“But also confronting a gap in the archives, a huge archival gap around the histories of these people around this time, which led me to visual art. So the work is very much in conversation with visual art around the Black body and the history of it.”

The poem “The Picture and the Frame” describes the experience of being a Black man in modern Venice, contemplating the representation of dark-skinned people in Renaissance paintings, their stories that were never told and the history that must be invented.

Allen-Paisant’s body of work often overlaps between poetry and philosophy, exploring the lived experiences of Afro-diasporic artists and communities around the world.

Based in Leeds, he teaches critical theory and creative writing at the University of Manchester. His first poetry collection, ‘Thinking with Trees,’ was awarded the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

His first non-fiction book, ‘Scanning the Bush,’ will be published later this year.

Allen-Paisant was chosen as the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize from a shortlist of 10 poets from across the UK, Ireland, Hong Kong and the US.

The T.S. Eliot Prize honours the best collection of poetry published in the year. This year, judges said they received a total of 186 submissions from British and Irish publishers.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Jason Allen-Paisant won the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize. The headline has been amended to correct this to the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize.