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 First awarded in 1997, the prize is given "for the best unpublished book-length collection of poetry in English, in honor of native Missourian T. S. Eliot’s considerable intellectual and artistic legacy".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 Poets submit their unpublished collections to Truman State University Press for each year's competition.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 poems and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken, the American writer and critic. After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Henri Alban-Fournier. From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. He first visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer programme, but when the First World War broke out he