Professor John Burnside of the
School of English has won the
TS Eliot Prize for Poetry for
Black Cat Bone at a recent ceremony in London
. The judges said
Black Cat Bone was "a haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness.
In an exceptional year, it is an outstanding book; one which the judges felt grew with every reading". The book's title refers to a particular bone extracted from a live cat, which is referred to in blues music as a good luck talisman.
Black Cat Bone is Burnside's 11th book of poetry
and won the 2011 Forward Prize for the best collection. Previous winners of the prize include Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy and Seamus Heaney. [
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