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David Harsent, a 72-year-old poet, has won the TS Eliot Prize after being shortlisted five times.

The writer, who also enjoys a successful career as the author of detective novels under the pseudonyms David Lawrence and Jack Curtis, has spoken to the Today programme about his winning collection of poetry, Fire Songs.

He also reflected on the work of TS Eliot to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Eliot's death.

Here is a copy of one of his award winning poems:

Dive

A little deeper and she’ll lose the light. At first
the surface is just touchable – shapes that might be clouds
or birds in flight… She sets her face to the skim

to get the last of the world she came from, some slight
sense of voices fading as she slips
from almost-day to almost-night, grey-green shading

first to blue, then more than blue, then to a blue never seen
by anyone but her, and that slow drift down now set to sever
all that she owned or wanted, all she had ever been.

First broadcast Today programme 13 January 2015.

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