Sarah Howe FRSL (born 1983) is a Chinese–British poet, editor and researcher in English literature. Her first full poetry collection, Loop of Jade (2015), won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of The Year Award. It is the first time that the T. S. Eliot Prize has been given to a debut collection.[1] She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow in English at University College London, as well as a trustee of The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.[2]
Howe was born in 1983 in Hong Kong. Her father is English; her mother was born in China, but left the country in 1949 for Hong Kong. The family moved to the UK in 1991, when Howe was aged seven.[3][4][5][6] Her first degree was in English at Christ's College, Cambridge, matriculating in 2001. She subsequently gained a PhD at that college; her thesis is entitled "Literature and the Visual Imagination in Renaissance England, 1580–1620".[7][8] During her studies, she spent a year at Harvard University, with a Kennedy Scholarship; it was there that she began to write poetry seriously at the age of around 21.[5][8][9]
She spent five years as a research fellow at the Faculty of English and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, until 2015.[8][10] Her research there was in the area of 16th- and 17th-century English literature; her interests included relationships between poetry and visual art forms, including sculpture and architecture.[8] In 2014, Howe founded the online poetry journal Prac Crit, and she continues to serve as one of its editors.[11][12]
In 2015–16, she was the Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study of Harvard University, where she focused on writing poetry.[3][5][13] She is one of the judges of the 2015 National Poetry CompetitionofThe Poetry Society.[11]
Howe's first poetry chapbook or pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, was published by Tall Lighthouse in 2009.[14] It won a 2010 Eric Gregory Trust Fund Award for poets under 30.[15] Howe was selected for The Complete Works mentoring programme in 2012.
Her first collection, Loop of Jade, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2015.[3] It explores Howe's British and Chinese heritage,[4] and in particular her mother's history as an abandoned female baby in China.[16] The main sequence of poems is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges's fictional encyclopedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.[17][18]
The collection won the 2015 T. S. Eliot Prize[1][19]—the first time this award has been given to a debut collection[1]—as well as the 2015 Sunday Times / Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of The Year Award.[4] It was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.[20] Loop of Jade was described by T. S. Eliot Prize chair Pascale Petit as "absolutely amazing"; Petit predicted that Howe's creative use of form would "change British poetry."[19] Andrew Holgate, literary editor of The Sunday Times, describes Loop of Jade as "a work of astonishing originality, depth and scope."[4]
As of 2015–16, Howe was working on a sequence called Two Systems, which examines China's interaction with the West and the recent history of Hong Kong, in particular the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement. The work uses techniques that include the incorporation of found documents, such as the constitution of Hong Kong, reworked by erasing material.[9][13]
Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including three editions of The Best British Poetry (Salt), Dear World & Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe; 2013) and Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe; 2014).[5][13][17] Her sonnet "Relativity", commissioned for the 2015 National Poetry Day, was recorded by physicist Stephen Hawking, also a fellow of Gonville and Caius College. His book A Brief History of Time had inspired Howe as a teenager.[4][21][22]
In June 2018 Howe was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.[23]