Canadian poet Anne Carson has won the T.S. Eliot poetry prize for her powerful chronicle of marriage and divorce, "The Beauty of the Husband."
Carson, the first woman to win the award in its nine-year history, was awarded the $14,000 prize at a ceremony in London on Monday. The prize is for the best poetry title published in Britain and Ireland.
Helen Dunmore, who chaired the judging panel, praised Carson's "tart, lyrical, erotic, plainspoken and highly charged" evocation of a collapsing marriage, told in 29 "tangos."
Carson, a 50-year-old history professor at McGill University in Montreal, beat a shortlist of 10 that included Nobelist Seamus Heaney.
The prize, presented by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot, is sponsored by the Poetry Book Society, which T.S. Eliot helped found in 1953.