The Scottish poet John Burnside has won the TS Eliot prize for poetry for his collection Black Cat Bone, the Guardian reports.

Burnside took the £15,000 prize for his eleventh collection, beating a strong list, including the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, David Harsent, Sean O’Brien, Bernard O’Donoghue and Leontia Flynn.

The Welsh poet Gillian Clarke, chair of the judges, said: “Amongst an unprecedentedly strong and unusually well-received shortlist, John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone is a haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness. In an exceptional year, it is an outstanding book, one which the judges felt grew with every reading.”

Burnside was presented with the cheque by Valerie Eliot, widow of the poet, at a ceremony in London. She has funded the prize itself since it was launched eighteen years ago but the Poetry Society, which organises the competition, will lose all its Arts Council grant this year, and its search for replacement funding proved bitterly divisive, with two poets, Alice Oswald and John Kinsella, withdrawing from the shortlist when a sponsorship deal was announced with Aurum, a hedge fund.

Read the full Guardian report