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.
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 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 engages 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.