T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University) T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University) The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is awarded annually by Truman State University, which is a United States university located in Missouri. First awarded in 1997, the prize is given "for the best unpublished book-length collection of poetry in English, in honor of native Missourian T. S. Eliot’s considerable intellectual and artistic legacy". Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. The prize includes publication of the collection as well as a purse of $2000. Poets submit their unpublished collections to Truman State University Press for each year's competition. A well-known
T. S. Eliot Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot "would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living." Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."