Dickey was announced as this year’s winner at a ceremony held at the Great Hall, Queen’s University Belfast, in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s.

The PEN Heaney Prize, founded in 2024, 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.

The inaugural PEN Heaney Prize was 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 winning title, 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.

Susannah Dickey, winner of the PEN Heaney Prize 2024, said:

I'm delighted to have won the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize. The Heaney family continues to do such brilliant work in Seamus' name, and the mission statement of this prize is such a necessary one. I believe poetry to be uniquely capable of querying and critiquing the linguistic structures that underpin the systems which dictate our lives, and in my mind there's no doubt that Heaney was one of the very best to do it. I'm very grateful that Nick, Paula, and Shazea may have thought my work somewhat successful in this regard, and I'm so happy to be a fragrant blight on the poetry landscape.

Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN, said: 

We are thrilled that Susannah Dickey’s first collection, ISDAL, is our first winner of the PEN Heaney Prize. Susannah has written an extraordinary, inventive collection that challenges us, with playful parody, to examine our obsession with true crime podcasts. Susannah’s words are startling and delighting; they open our minds, detonating fresh ideas and images in the synapses. The PEN Heaney Prize has been a long-held ambition of English PEN and Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann. We are enormously grateful to the Estate of Seamus Heaney, Hawthornden Foundation, and to our inaugural judges, for making it possible. We wanted to honour Seamus Heaney as a poet who was as warmly humane as he was magnificently talented. He was concerned to offer encouragement, advice, and attention to fellow poets – both of his own generation, and those younger writers who often sent him unsolicited manuscripts. In this context, it seems fitting that a debut poet from Derry, the county of Seamus’s birth, is our first winner.

Catherine Dunne, Chair of Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann, said:

At Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann, an all-island organisation, we feel privileged to have worked closely with English PEN and the Estate of Seamus Heaney in the awarding of the PEN Heaney Prize 2024. From an extraordinarily rich and diverse shortlist, Susannah Dickey’s first collection, ISDAL, has emerged as the winner of this inaugural award. Dickey’s ISDAL is poetry that explores the impact of individual cultural events on the human condition without ever losing ‘its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness’. With an underlying theme of violence against women, and society’s obsession with ‘true crime’, this collection directs our focus to the wider world in a way that chimes perfectly with PEN’s emphasis on human rights and the promotion of literature that serves to illuminate and engage. In Seamus Heaney’s own words “I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.

Catherine Heaney, Estate of Seamus Heaney, said:

On behalf of the Estate of Seamus Heaney, I am delighted that the judges of the PEN Heaney Prize have selected ISDAL by Susannah Dickey as the winner, in this inaugural year. In an incredibly strong field of contenders that reflected the richness and multiplicity of voices and subjects contained within collections published in 2023, ISDAL stood out for its formal inventiveness, engagement with themes in popular culture, and sheer brio. We are grateful to our partners at English PEN and Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann, and for the support of Hawthornden Foundation, and offer our warmest congratulations to Susannah and all of the shortlisted poets.

Also shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2024 were:

• 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 is supported by Hawthornden Foundation and the Estate of Seamus Heaney. 

 

ENDS

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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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Twitter/X: @EnglishPEN  

Facebook: @EnglishPENofficial  

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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.

The Winner

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.