Writer and performer Roger Robinson has won the 2019 TS Eliot Prize for the publication A Portable Paradise. Rogerson was announced as the winner at an award ceremony in the Wallace Collection on 13 January. The night before at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall all ten shortlisted poets took part in a reading.

Chair John Burnside said, “This ambitious and wide-ranging shortlist speaks to all that poetry can be. The winner, Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise, finds in the bitterness of everyday experience continuing evidence of ‘sweet, sweet life’.”

Lead lyricist for King Midas Sound, who last year released Solitude on Cosmo Rhythmatic, Robinson published his first full poetry collection The Butterfly Hotel in 2013. An alumnus of The Complete Works and co-founder of both Spoke Lab and writing collective Malika’s Kitchen, he previously won the People’s Book Prize and the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize for Suitcase (2004) and Suckle (2009). He's released two solo album on Jahtari, and in 2019 released the single “Stay”, produced by Jabu and Ossia, on No Corner.

A Portable Paradise is published by Peepal Tree Press.

Watch him read “Ghosts” from a series of poems he wrote about the Grenfell Tower victims.

“Black Olive” from A Portable Paradise

Check out his Instagram for more readings.