John Burnside has won the TS Eliot Prize, the most prestigious award in British poetry, at an award ceremony in London.
The Haberdasher’s Hall near the Barbican was the venue where the eight shortlisted poets - Carol Ann Duffy, John Burnside, Leontia Flynn, David Harsent, Esther Morgan, Daljit Nagra, Sean O'Brien and Bernard O'Donoghue - waited to find out who would be named the winner of the TS Eliot Prize and collect £15,000.
In the end, John Burnside's victory with his 15th collection of poetry Black Cat Bone came on the back of an enormously successful 2011 in which he won five literary recognitions including a Costa Book Award nomination (for his novel A Summer Of Drowning) and the Forward Prize for Black Cat Bone - a dark, brooding collection in which mankind's only solace from a cruel world of ice and blood and angry gods is each other.
The 56-year-old's acceptance speech was delivered in the form, fittingly, of a poem called Loved And Lost.
The announcement came after the traditional TS Eliot Prize reading event which takes place on the eve of the prize giving. You can hear the full audio from the event - which attracted over 2,000 poetry fans - exclusively on HuffPost UK Culture.
John Burnside's success occurs in what has been a difficult year for the prize, after two of the original shortlist - Alice Oswald and John Kinsella - withdrew from the running in protest at the new sponsors of the award, Aurum Funds.
Nativity by John Burnside
I come by chance. A train slows in the fog
and stands a while
and, when it leaves, there's one more soul aboard,
sung from the quiet, passing from car to car,
like the angel of God;
or, north of here, in some old lumber town,
the church clock stops, the wind dies in the trees
and I lie squalling in a slick of blood
and moonlight, seventh son
to some man's seventh son.
No gifts for me, no angel in the rafters
caught like a bird in the updraft from the stove,
only the words of an old curse scratched on the wall,
and the warmth of my mother
fading, as lights go out
in house after house, from here
to the edge of the world,
her slack mouth, then the darkness in her eyes
the first thing I see
when the midwife returns with a candle.