Awards: T.S. Eliot Poetry; JQ Wingate Literary

Hannah Sullivan has won the £25,000 (about $32,225) T.S. Eliot Prize, awarded annually to the author of the best new collection of poetry published in the U.K. and Ireland, for Three Poems, the Guardian reported.

"A star is born. Where has she come from?" said chair of judges Sinéad Morrissey. "I don't know her personally, I hadn't read her in magazines or anywhere else before. She has not come through the usual creative-writing, pamphlet route. She has just arrived, and it is breathtaking. I couldn't be more delighted if I had won it myself."

Morrissey added that the decision was unanimous: "Our relationship with her work only deepened on each subsequent rereading. It is not just the formal mastery, but how that formal mastery is so well-handled as to be almost invisible. That is the height of praise. You almost don't notice the architecture underneath because you are so compelled by what is being said.... [Three Poems] is taking on perennial themes such as our mortality, our sexuality, our gender and our movement through time and place, and doing it in such a fresh and observant way. It is an absolutely exhilarating collection and it is all the more surprising that it is a debut."

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The shortlist has been unveiled for the £4,000 (about $5,155) JQ Wingate Literary Prize, which honors "the best book, fiction or nonfiction, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader." The winner will be announced February 25. The shortlisted titles are:

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
No Place to Lay One's Head by Françoise Frenkel, translated by Stephanie Smee
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
Eternal Life by Dara Horn
Evacuation by Raphael Jerusalmy, translated by Penny Hueston
Memento Park by Mark Sarvas

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