Sean O'BRIEN wins the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry

THE YEAR 2007 belongs to poet Sean O’Brien. In October 2007, he won the 2007 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection, his third win. O’Brien has also won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry with his latest collection, The Drowned Book (Picador, 2007), it was announced on January 14, 2008, beating off stiff competition from Edwin Morgan’s A Book of Lives (Carcanet, 2007) and Fiona Sampson’s Common Prayer (Carcanet, 2007). O’Brien now holds the distinction of being the first poet to have won the U.K.’s two premier poetry prizes in a single year.