Jason Allen-Paisant has won the T.S. Eliot prize for his moving and lyrical second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello.

Published by Carcanet Press, Self-Portrait as Othello refracts Allen-Paisant’s European travels and considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressiveness and vulnerabilities. Othello’s intertwined identities as ‘immigrant’ and ‘Black’, which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.

The judges, Paul Muldoon, Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul, described the collection as a work of ‘great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair’ and ‘a book to which readers will return for many years’.