Poet Sarah Howe named young writer of the year

Sarah Howe
Photo by Hayley Madden

Poet Sarah Howe named young writer of the year

Half-Chinese author’s debut collection Loop of Jade, exploring her dual heritage, praised by judges as ‘a work of astonishing originality’


Alison Flood
Friday 11 December 2015 12.38 GMT

Sarah Howe has been named young writer of the year for a “luminous” first collection of poetry exploring her dual English and Chinese heritage, Loop of Jade.

Howe, 32, was named winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop young writer of the year award on Thursday night. The £5,000 prize, won in the past by Zadie Smith, Robert Macfarlane and Simon Armitage, is for the best piece of fiction, non-fiction or poetry by a British or Irish writer aged 35 or under.

This year, Howe was the only poet to be shortlisted, with her collection competing with Sunjeev Sahota’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Year of the Runaways, Ben Fergusson’s Betty Trask award-winning historical novel The Spring of Kasper Meier, and Sara Taylor’s Baileys-nominated The Shore.

Andrew Holgate, judge and Sunday Times literary editor, said the choice of Howe was “unanimous”. “From the strongest of shortlists, they selected Loop of Jade by Sarah Howe as a work of astonishing originality, depth and scope,” he said, praising her “luminous” work.

“She is a writer always conscious of language. These are poems that are sensuous, subtle, and full of immediacy and resonance,” added Holgate.

Howe, who was born in Hong Kong to an English father and a Chinese mother, told the Guardian that she was astonished to win. “The three other books were so extraordinary that I was just enjoying being shortlisted,” she said.

Loop of Jade is her first collection, and was previously shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, and for the Forward prize for best first collection. She spent 10 years writing it, and it has “quite a strong narrative strand running through it”.

“A lot of the poems are telling the story of my mother, who was an abandoned baby in China, almost certainly given up because she was a girl. That story is entwined with the story of my own childhood in Hong Kong,” she said. “It’s told quite elliptically and in fragments – poetry is good at that, and that’s the way the story was told to me. I heard about my mother’s story in fragments.”

Her mother, she added, is pleased about the success of Loop of Jade. “I think she’s really proud; we have glancing conversations about it, where I ask a question and she answers a different question. But she tells everyone about it.”

With her win, following poet Andrew McMillan’s triumph in the Guardian first book award for his collection Physical, Howe said that “poetry seems to be having a bit of a moment in the national consciousness”.

For National Poetry Day this year, Howe’s poem Relativity was recorded by Stephen Hawking. “They say / a flash seen from on and off a hurtling train / will explain why time dilates like a perfect / afternoon,” he read, asking: “If we can think / this far, might not our eyes adjust to the dark?”

Novelist Sarah Waters, a former winner of the prize who joined Holgate along with Sunday Times chief fiction reviewer Peter Kemp on the judging panel, said that Howe was “a significant literary talent, a very special writer indeed”.

THE GUARDIAN