This year’s TS Eliot prize winner, Roger Robinson, has won the Royal Society of Literature’s £10,000 Ondaatje prize, which goes to a work that best evokes “the spirit of a place”.

Robinson’s collection A Portable Paradise is only the second work by a poet to win the prize. The prize judge and poet Pascale Petit,  the only other writer to win the Ondaatje for a poetry collection, called A Portable Paradise a “healing” and “profoundly moving book [that] manages to balance anger and love, rage and craft”. The Ondaatje prize can go to a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry. Petit’s Mama Amazonica won the prize in 2018.

Background: Roger Robinson wins £25,000 TS Eliot prize