Unknown Jen Hadfield wins T S Eliot prize

Jen Hadfield, a 30-year-old poet who supplements the slim income she makes from verse by working in a shop, has won one of poetry’s grandest awards, the TS Eliot Prize, which has been won in the past by Seamus Heaney and the late poet laureate Ted Hughes.

The £15,000 prize was awarded to Hadfield (pictured), who is based in the remote Scottish Shetland Islands, for her second anthology, Nigh-No-Place. It was written partly while she travelled across Canada and includes poems such as Paternoster, which is the Lord's Prayer as spoken by a draught horse, and Ten-Minute Break Haiku, Hadfield's response to working in a fish factory.

The current poet laureate, Andrew Motion, chairman of the judges, said he was delighted that Hadfield was the winner. "Nigh-No-Place shows that she is a remarkably original poet near the beginning of what is obviously going to be a distinguished career."

However, while the poets and publishers who gathered at the Skinners' Hall in London for the prize-giving last night delighted in Hadfield's win, it was an evening of mixed emotions after it emerged that another shortlisted poet, Mick Imlah, had died after a long struggle with motor neurone disease. Well-known in poetry circles – he was poetry editor of the Times Literary Supplement - Imlah last year won the Forward Prize for poetry for The Lost Leader, his first collection in 20 years.