Sarah Howe
{{Short description|British poet}}
{{For|the American fraudster of the 1870s and 1880s|Sarah Howe (fraudster)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=August 2018}}
{{Use British English|date=August 2018}}
Sarah Howe {{post-nominals|country=GBR|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. 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.[https://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/about/trustees/ Griffin Poetry Prize / About / Trustees]
Biography
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.{{citation|title=Sarah Howe – Biography| url=http://sarahhowepoetry.com/biography.html |access-date=12 January 2016}}{{citation|url=http://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/poet/sarah-howe/ |title=Sarah Howe |publisher=Forward Arts Foundation |access-date=12 January 2016}}{{citation|url=http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/08/i-to-china-an-ideogram-on-sea-cloud.html |title=I. To China: That Blue Flower on the Map |first=Sarah |last=Howe |date=12 August 2013 |work=Best American Poetry |access-date=13 January 2016}} 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".{{citation|url=http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/news/sarah-howe-m-2001-young-writer-year|title=Sarah Howe (m 2001), Young Writer of the Year|publisher=Christ's College, Cambridge|access-date=12 January 2016}}{{dead link|date=March 2018 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} 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.{{citation |url=http://bookanista.com/sarah-howe/ |title=Sarah Howe: Remaking memory |first=Mark |last=Reynolds |work=bookanista.com |date=12 December 2015 |access-date=13 January 2016}}
She spent five years as a research fellow at the Faculty of English and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, until 2015.{{citation|url=http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/people/Sarah.Howe/|title=Dr Sarah Howe, Gonville and Caius|publisher=Faculty of English, University of Cambridge|access-date=12 January 2016}}{{citation|url=http://www.cai.cam.ac.uk/news/prestigious-award-for-caian-poet| title=Prestigious award for Caian poet |publisher=Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge |access-date=12 January 2016}} 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. In 2014, Howe founded the online poetry journal Prac Crit, and she continues to serve as one of its editors.{{citation|title= Prac Crit: About|url=http://www.praccrit.com/about/ |access-date=12 January 2016}}
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.{{citation|url=http://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/sarah-howe|title=Sarah Howe |publisher=Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study|access-date=12 January 2016}} She is one of the judges of the 2015 National Poetry Competition of The Poetry Society.{{citation|url=http://poetrysociety.org.uk/competitions/national-poetry-competition/judges/ |title=Judges |work=National Poetry Competition |publisher=The Poetry Society |access-date=12 January 2016}}
Poetry
Howe's first poetry chapbook or pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, was published by Tall Lighthouse in 2009.{{citation|title=Sarah Howe – Pamphlet |url=http://sarahhowepoetry.com/books.html#PamphletAnchor |access-date=12 January 2016 }} It won a 2010 Eric Gregory Trust Fund Award for poets under 30.{{citation |url=http://www.societyofauthors.org/eric-gregory-past-winners |title=The Eric Gregory Trust Fund Awards: Past Winners |access-date=12 January 2016 |archive-date=27 March 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140327205725/http://societyofauthors.org/eric-gregory-past-winners |url-status=dead }} Howe was selected for The Complete Works mentoring programme in 2012.
Her first collection, Loop of Jade, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2015. It explores Howe's British and Chinese heritage, and in particular her mother's history as an abandoned female baby in China.{{citation|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/11/poet-sarah-howe-named-young-writer-of-the-year |title=Poet Sarah Howe named young writer of the year |first=Alison |last=Flood |journal=The Guardian |date=11 December 2015 |access-date=12 January 2016 }} The main sequence of poems is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges's fictional encyclopedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.{{citation |title=Review: Loop of Jade – Sarah Howe |first=George |last=Jackson |journal=Ambit |date=31 July 2015 }}
The collection won the 2015 T. S. Eliot Prize{{citation|url=http://poetrybooks.co.uk/news/517/debut_collection_scoops_t_s_eliot_prize/|title=Debut collection scoops T S Eliot Prize|publisher=Poetry Book Society|access-date=13 January 2016|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160131151758/http://poetrybooks.co.uk/news/517/debut_collection_scoops_t_s_eliot_prize/|archive-date=31 January 2016}}{{citation|last=Brown|first=Mark|journal=The Guardian |title=TS Eliot prize: poet Sarah Howe wins with 'amazing' debut|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/11/ts-eliot-prize-poet-sarah-howe-wins-with-amazing-debut|date=11 January 2016|access-date=12 January 2016 }}—the first time this award has been given to a debut collection—as well as the 2015 Sunday Times / Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of The Year Award.{{citation|url=http://www.petersfraserdunlop.com/prize/2015-winner/ |title= 2015 Winner |publisher=Sunday Times / Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of The Year |access-date=12 January 2016}} It was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.{{citation|url=http://www.thebookseller.com/news/forward-prizes-shortlists-revealed |title=Forward Prizes shortlists revealed |journal=The Bookseller |first=Sarah |last=Shaffi |date=8 June 2015 |access-date=13 January 2016}} 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." Andrew Holgate, literary editor of The Sunday Times, describes Loop of Jade as "a work of astonishing originality, depth and scope."
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.
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).{{citation |url=http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/27095/Sarah-Howe |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150930223746/http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/27095/Sarah-Howe |url-status=usurped |archive-date=30 September 2015 |title=Sarah Howe |first=Kate |last=Potts |date=23 July 2015 |publisher=Poetry International Rotterdam |access-date=12 January 2016}} 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.{{citation|url=http://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/national-poetry-day/what-is-national-poetry-day/national-poetry-day-2015-light/ |title=National Poetry Day 2015: Light |access-date=12 January 2016}}{{citation|url=http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/10/08/on-relativity/ |title=On "Relativity" |journal=The Paris Review |first= Sarah |last= Howe |date=8 October 2015 |access-date=12 January 2016}}
In June 2018 Howe was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.{{Cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/28/royal-society-of-literature-40-under-40-fellows|title=Royal Society of Literature admits 40 new fellows to address historical biases|last=Flood|first=Alison|date=2018-06-28|website=the Guardian|language=en|access-date=2018-07-03}}
List of major works
- Loop of Jade (2015)
References
{{reflist}}
External links
- {{official|http://www.sarahhowepoetry.co.uk/}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Howe, Sarah}}
Category:21st-century British poets
Category:21st-century British women writers
Category:Alumni of Christ's College, Cambridge
Category:British Asian writers
Category:English people of Chinese descent
Category:Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
Category:Hong Kong people of English descent