English PEN, together with Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, announces the shortlist for the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize, which recognises a single volume of poetry by one author, published in the UK or Ireland, of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships.

• Five of the six shortlisted authors are of Irish and Northern Irish heritage.
• The shortlist represents six titles from six different publishers.
• Titles include a debut collection, poetry in translation, and book-length narrative verse.
• Themes explored in the shortlist include grief and memory, bodily autonomy, the Troubles, identity in exile, true crime, and the resilience of working-class culture.

The winner of this year’s PEN Heaney Prize will be announced on 2 December 2024 at a ceremony held at the Great Hall, Queen’s University, Belfast, in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. Tickets to the ceremony are free and are available to book here.

The PEN Heaney Prize 2024 shortlist is:

• Isdal by Susannah Dickey (Picador Poetry)
• The Coming Thing by Martina Evans (Carcanet Poetry)
• Hyena! by Fran Lock (Poetry Bus Press)
• Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness (Cape Poetry)
• We Play Here by Dawn Watson (Granta Poetry)
• A Tower Built Downwards by Yang Lian, translated by Brian Holton (Bloodaxe Books)

The inaugural PEN Heaney Prize has been judged by poets Nick Laird, Paula Meehan and Shazea Quraishi, with Catherine Heaney joining them as non-voting Chair and representing the Estate of Seamus Heaney.

Of the shortlisted titles, the judging panel said:

“Susannah Dickey’s Isdal is an astonishingly inventive look at a cold case, that of an unidentified woman found in 1970 near Bergen in Norway. Armed with a wide variety of forms and a formidable vocabulary, Dickey explores and satirises the true crime genre, and specifically our culture’s obsession with female victims.”

“In The Coming Thing Martina Evans offers a powerfully realised world — 1980s Cork — and an unforgettable narrator, Imelda, on a journey to England for an abortion. From the strictures of a Republic which denied Irish women bodily autonomy until constitutional change in 2018, Evans creates an Everywoman on the brink of the digital age."

“Fran Lock’s Hyena! comes at the reader with all the feral energy of its totem animal; it’s a devouring and hallucinatory work that channels the embodied grief of the queerminded into a mirror for our age. At its deep heart’s core is a righteous and riotous engagement with working class culture’s magnificent anarchic spirit.”

“Patrick McGuinness’s Blood Feather is a profound work of elegy, principally for the author’s mother, but also for the objects and places overtaken by time, for dynamited cooling towers and villages replaced by shopping centres, for the way one language replaces another. McGuinness is a brilliant ‘connoisseur of the noises things make when they leave’.” 

“Dawn Watson’s We Play Here is an extraordinary long poem spoken by four twelve-year-old girls in working class Belfast in the summer of 1988. Watson has a remarkable ability to recover both the sensations of childhood and the febrile atmosphere of the Troubles, where terror was normalised and violence endemic.” 

"Yang Lian’s A Tower Built Downwards, impeccably transported from the Chinese by Brian Holton, offers us a clear lens on the lived reality of a haunted world of exile and displacement. Steeped in classical Chinese poetry, with a spirited understanding of historical forces, Yang offers us elegy as a sublime art in a fallen world."

Zoe Sadler, Events and Prizes Manager at English PEN, said:

The surprising, distinct, and deeply personal ways in which each of these six poets engage with the impact of cultural or political events on the human condition reflect both the expansive creative potential of this type of poetry and the judges’ thoughtful approach to their task. It’s incredibly exciting to present such an ambitious inaugural shortlist.

The inaugural PEN Heaney Prize is supported by Hawthornden Foundation. 

 

ENDS

 

Notes to editors 

Launched in 2024, open to collections published in the UK or Ireland, including the British Isles, between 1 January and 31 December 2023, the PEN Heaney Prize recognises a single volume of poetry, published in the UK or Ireland, of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships. Through his essays, lectures, and addresses, Heaney became one of the most eloquent advocates for poetry and the role of the poet in public life. He understood the power of poetry to speak and respond to certain moments and experiences in the wider world, while always mindful that poetry must never lose “its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness.” Open to writers of any nationality or geographical location, including those whose work has been translated into English, at any stage of their career, the prize recognises the diverse voices producing this kind of poetry.

In its inaugural year, the PEN Heaney Prize received 126 submissions.

English PEN is one of the world's oldest human rights organisations, championing the freedom to write and read. We are the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers’ association with 130 centres in more than 90 countries. With the support of our members – a community of readers, writers, and activists – we protect freedom of expression whenever it is under attack, support writers facing persecution around the world, and celebrate contemporary international writing with literary prizes, grants, events, and our online magazine PEN Transmissions. 

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Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann 

The aims of Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann are to promote literature in and about Ireland both nationally and internationally; to defend worldwide the right of writers to responsible freedom of expression as defined in the PEN Charter; and to foster international understanding through the appreciation of literature. Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann is active in support of writers who are at risk or in prison because of their writing and has fostered links with other writers’ associations in Ireland such as the Irish Writers’ Union, Aontas na Scríbhneoirí Gaeilge and the Letters With Wings project. 

The Estate of Seamus Heaney 

The Estate of Seamus Heaney was set up by the Heaney family in 2017 to preserve, protect and promote the work of Seamus Heaney. It is a Designated Activity Company registered in Ireland, and governed by a board of seven directors. 

Hawthornden Foundation  

Hawthornden Foundation is a private charitable foundation founded in 1982 to support contemporary writers and the literary arts. Established by Drue Heinz, the noted philanthropist and patron of the arts, the Foundation is named after Hawthornden Castle in Midlothian, Scotland, where an international residential residency program provides month-long retreats for creative writers from all disciplines to work in peaceful surroundings. Hawthornden also supports a second residential program at Casa Ecco, on Lake Como in Italy, the site of “Conversazioni”, private conferences attended by many celebrated writers and others in the arts, and a retreat for invited authors to complete a literary work in progress. In 2024, Hawthornden Foundation opened a new non-residential retreat — Hawthornden Brooklyn — in New York. In addition, the Foundation sponsors the annual Hawthornden Prize, one of Britain’s oldest and foremost literary awards, and provides grant support to other literary programs.  hawthornden.org

The Judges 

Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone in 1975. A poet, novelist, screenwriter, children’s book author and ex-lawyer, his awards include the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, a Guggenheim fellowship and a Forward Prize. He is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queens’ University, Belfast. 

Paula Meehan was born in the north inner city of Dublin. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Eastern Washington University in the U.S. Her poetry has received both popular and critical acclaim. She has moderated workshops in the community, in the prisons, in recovery programmes and has worked extensively with emerging poets inside and outside the universities. Her work has been translated into many languages, most recently into Japanese and Dutch with volumes in preparation in Spanish, Polish & Greek. She has received the Butler Literary Award for Poetry presented by the Irish American Cultural Institute, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award for Dharmakaya, published in 2000, the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry, 2015. She was honoured with election to Aosdána, the Irish Academy for the Arts, in 1996. She was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2013 – 2016, and her public lectures from these years, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, was published by UCD Press in 2016. Geomantic was published by Dedalus Press, Dublin, in 2016 and received a Cholmondelay Award. 

As If By Magic, which selects poems from over thirty years of work, was published in October of 2020 by Dedalus Press, Dublin and in spring of 2021 by Wake Forest University Press, North Carolina. The Solace of Artemis was published in 2023 by Dedalus Press. 

Shazea Quraishi is a Pakistani-born Canadian poet and translator based in London.  Her poems have appeared in UK and US publications including The Guardian, The Financial Times, Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and most recently Poetry: A Writer's Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, U.S. 2023). Books include The Glimmer (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), The Taxidermist (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), The Art of Scratching (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), and The Courtesans Reply (flipped eye publishing, 2012). 

An alumna of the Complete Works, she is a writer in residence with Living Words, an arts charity that works with individuals impacted by dementia or mental health concerns. She teaches with the Poetry School and runs Poetry Studio, a programme of writing workshops. 

Shazea worked with English PEN as a writer on the outreach program from 2010–2015 in prisons and refugee organisations, and was a trustee from 2015–2023. 

Author bios

Susannah Dickey is a writer from Derry. She is the author of two novels, Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022), and her debut collection of poetry, Isdal, was published in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Martina Evans was born in Cork and lives in London. She is the author of 13 books of poetry and prose. American Mules (Carcanet Press) won the Pigott Poetry Prize and was an Irish Times and TLS Book of the Year. The Coming Thing (Carcanet 2023) is shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and its sequel Drunken Driving will be published by Carcanet in 2026. She is a fellow of the Royal Society Literature and a poetry critic for The Irish Times.

Brian Holton grew up in Nigeria and Scotland; he was educated at Galashiels Academy, Edinburgh and Durham. He has won prizes for poetry and for translation: he won the 2021 Sarah Maguire Prize for Yang Lian’s Anniversary Snow. He is a retired academic who taught in Edinburgh, Durham, Newcastle, and Hong Kong. His newest book of Yang Lian’s poetry is A Tower Built Downwards and his collections of classical poems in Scots Hard Roads an Cauld Hairst Winds (Taproot Press 2022), and Aa Cled wi Clouds She Cam were shortlisted for Scots Book of the Year.

Fran Lock is the author of numerous chapbooks and 13 poetry collections, most recently The New Herbal (Blueprint Press 2024). A collection of hybrid essays relating to dirty animality, queer failure, and trash-feminist practice, Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects was published by Out-Spoken Press in 2023.

Patrick McGuinness is the author of two previous books of poetry, two novels, The Last Hundred Days and Throw Me to the Wolves, and a non-fiction book about place, time and memory, and his mother's small Belgian border town of Bouillon – Other People's Countries – which was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, won the Wales Book of the Year, and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.

Dawn Watson’s debut collection We Play Here (Granta Poetry) was a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize for outstanding debut. It was described as an “extraordinary, game-changing narrative long poem” by Luke Kennard. Dawn’s pamphlet The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher is published by The Emma Press (2019). Her work has been featured on BBC Radio 4, as well as in leading journals such as Granta and The Poetry Review. She is a lecturer in creative writing at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Yang Lian (*1955) is a Chinese poet who lives in London, UK, and Berlin, Germany. He published 15 volumes of poetry, including Yi (2002), Where the Sea Stands Still (1999), Concentric Circles (2005), Riding Pisces (2008), Lee Valley Poems (2009), Narrative Poem (2016), Anniversary Snow (2019) and A Tower Built Downwards (2023). His works have been translated into more than 30 languages. Among his prizes were the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award (2024), the inaugural Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation (2021), PEN Translates (2017 and 2024) and the Nonino Prize in 2012.

Media

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