Poets are prone to melodramatic gestures, but the audience's gasps were of genuine surprise when Andrew Motion announced Jen Hadfield as the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize in London on Monday night. “Ooh, that's a bit of a shock!” stage-whispered one, as Hadfield, at 30 the youngest winner of Britain's most valuable poetry award, collected her £15,000 cheque from Eliot's immaculate 82-year-old widow, Valerie.

Britain no longer has the popular appetite for poetry that made Eliot a star in his time, yet the prize dedicated to his memory tends to go to established names: think of Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes. Which is why they gasped.

“I missed those gasps - there was too much ringing in my ears going on,” Hadfield said yesterday morning in the restaurant of her Euston hotel. Nigh-No-Place, her winning collection, was described by the Poet Laureate (who has never won the prize himself) as “a revelation; jaunty, energetic, iconoclastic - even devil-may-care”.

Some of the 42 poems were written while Hadfield was hoofing across Canada a few years ago, taking in the “miserable monochrome” of Alberta, polar bears in formaldehyde, huskies and visits to gloriously named northern towns such as Tsiigehchic. Most of them, though, are set in Burra, the Shetland Isle where she has lived for the past four years.

“I can hop over my back gate and there are some cliffs and the Atlantic,” Hadfield said . “I can stand and look out at an amazing pointy island, which is the last land before Greenland. It is stunning.”

Born in Cheshire to an English father and a Canadian mother, Hadfield studied English at Edinburgh and started writing under the tutelage of the novelist and poet Robert Allan Jamieson, before further study in Glasgow and her move to the island. “In Shetland,” she says, “where you might think someone would feel isolated, I feel connected and protected - and more willing to be connected and protected than I ever have in my life.”

Burra, its animals and its people are the stars of Hadfield's poems, as are its words: she uses both Scots and Shetland dialect words with relish - words such as “glid” (sunshine between showers) “glinder” (to peer through half-shut eyes), “ill-tricket” (mischievous) and “uncan” (strange). “The language is very rich,” she says. “Some words are so local that they don't occur ten minutes down the road.”

To supplement her bursaries and support from Shetland Arts “who have more or less fed me in the last three or four years” she worked for a while in a fish-packing factory and found herself fascinated by the other sea-life brought in with the haddock. Even the “gut-worms” she had to pluck from their stomach cavities make an appearance in print.

Poetry is a most unreliable occupation, and Hadfield admits that “the financial thing is terrifying - I'm a bit of a control person and I don't like uncertainty”. But now the T.S. Eliot prize has given her, as she says, “plenty of writing time” to come.

Glid

I turn the camera on my dissolving self,

pale-tongued and rabbit-eyed -

I turn the camera on dazzled

Everything -

plain rain - the loch -

the incandescent horses

forged black against the broch -

me, my brimming head,

precarious as a dandelion clock -

and dimpling the loch,

black button on bright,

a dinghy row-rowed,

skewered with light.

First poem for Owl and Sophie

The sure-to-god-hoax of his footfall

as he burgles his house for the very first time,

his audible paws squishing the carpet,

smacking his lips and sampling the apprehension

around things that should dole out light and heat - cadaverous boiler, blown grey light-bulb.

And the gale tries to thresh the boons from the house - the broken gate braced and percolated by darkness,

the onions poked blind in their fishbox of earth,

the new cat packed into the crook of my knees -

a drift of scalloped, chilly fur -

so begins a trek of years together,

huddled on the bobsleigh of the blanketed sofa.

Self-portrait as a Fortune-telling Miracle Fish

I'm disappointed in the gods that formed me thus

in the likeness of the wall-eyed Halibut;

in my longing, a Meagre or Eelpout;

in my maudlin, a Poor Cod or Bitterling.

I'm disgusted with whichever of you

chose jealousy-with-an-overbite

to be my consort, my symbiotic groupie

and yet some rogue demi-deity

gave a posy of dubious virtues -

made me transparent; electric;

a Wide-eyed Flounder; a Crystal Gobi;

a Stargazer; a Velvet-belly;

a Deepsea Angler, blind,

were it not for this proboscis

that lets me troll my little lantern

in the silt and dim

off the continental shelf.

And my daemon's a dogfish - I think -

a Starry Hound, a blunt and hungry hobo,

scrounging, starveling, sleeping on the go.

Taken from Nigh-No-Place, by Jen Hadfield (Bloodaxe Books, 2008)

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