English PEN, together with Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, tonight announced Susannah Dickey’s ISDAL (Picador Poetry) as the winner of the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize. 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.