Jed Handfield wins the TS Eliot prize for her second book, beating out favourite Mick Imlah, who just died this week, after a long struggle with his motor neurone disease.

Shetland-based Jen Hadfield was given a cheque for £15,000 but she will doubtless be just as grateful for the sales and profile boost that winning the prize will bring about.

For the poets and publishers who gathered at London’s Skinners’ Hall for the prize-giving last night it was an evening of mixed emotions after it emerged that another shortlisted poet, Mick Imlah, had died after a long struggle with motor neurone disease. Well-known in poetry circles – he was poetry editor of the Times Literary Supplement – Imlah last year won the Forward prize for poetry for The Lost Leader, his first collection in 20 years.

Hadfield won for Nigh-No-Place, her second book of poetry written in Shetland and also while travelling across Canada. It includes poems such as Paternoster, which is the Lord’s Prayer as spoken by a draught horse and Ten-Minute Break Haiku, Hadfield’s response to working in a fish factory.