Biography
Sarah Howe is a poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.
Alongside her research interests in contemporary British and American poetry, she is a scholar of sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature. Her publications on Renaissance writing and art revolve around interdisciplinary approaches to word and image, rhetoric and poetics, and literature and the visual imagination.
She studied for her BA, MPhil and PhD at Christ's College, Cambridge, spending a year as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. Before coming to King’s, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University College London and a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Previous honours include a Hawthorden Fellowship and the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
Research Interests and PhD Supervision
Contemporary poetry and poetics; poetry and race; the lyric essay and creative non-fiction; early modern non-dramatic literature; the mind’s eye and visual imagination.
For more details, please see her full research profile.
Teaching
Creative writing (poetry and prose fiction).
Expertise and Public Engagement
Sarah’s reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including theLondon Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement, while recent poems have been published in The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times and Poetry. She appears regularly on BBC Radio 3 and 4, at literary festivals around the world and has travelled internationally with the British Council.
She has served as guest editor for recent issues of The Poetry Review(Winter 2016) and Poetry London (Autumn 2017). In 2014, she founded Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism, which she co-edits with Vidyan Ravinthiran and Dai George.
A film of her poem ‘Relativity’, read by Stephen Hawking, was commissioned for National Poetry Day 2015. Other recent projects include a verse drama, Telemachus, for BBC Radio 4, as well as collaborations with the composer Prach Boondiskulchok for Poet in the City and with sound artist Chu-Li Shewring for the Crick Institute.