Hong Kong-born poet’s TS Eliot prize win ‘will change British poetry’
Sarah Howe’s debut collection ‘absolutely amazing’, says chairman of judges for HK$225,000 award. Winning poems chart poet’s journeys back to Hong Kong to rediscover her roots in city where she was born to an English father and Chinese mother
A Hong Kong-born poet, who judges say “will change British poetry”, has won the TS Eliot poetry prize. Sarah Howe , a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, was awarded the £20,000 (HK$225,000) prize for Loop of Jade, which explores her dual British and Chinese heritage.
Howe’s poems chart the journeys she made back to Hong Kong to rediscover her roots. Her work – the first debut poetry collection to win the British prize since it was inaugurated in 1993 – triumphed over a particularly strong shortlist, which featured some of poetry’s biggest names, including Don Paterson , Claudia Rankine , Sean O’Brien and Les Murray .
Pascale Petit, the poet who chaired the panel of judges, said that 32-year-old Howe’s work was “absolutely amazing” and that her experimentations with form would “change British poetry”.
“She is exploring the situation of women in China, but she doesn’t do it just like that; she does it in a very erudite and dense, rich, imagistic way,” Petit says.
Especially impressive were Howe’s different and daring forms of poetry, and her powerful use of blank space, says Petit.