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WORK TITLE: Open, Heaven
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WEBSITE: https://www.seanehewitt.com/
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PERSONAL
Born in 1990, in Warrington, Cheshire, England.
EDUCATION:Girton College, Cambridge (English); University of Liverpool, Institute of Irish Studies, Ph.D. (the works of J. M. Synge).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, lecturer, critic, and academic. Trinity College, Assistant Professor in Literary Practice.
AWARDS:Northern Writers’ Award, 2016; Resurgence Prize, 2017; Eric Gregory Award, 2019; The Sunday Times, named in “30 under 30” artists in Ireland, 2020; Laurel Prize, 2021, for Tongues of Fire; Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, 2022, All Down Darkness Wide; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
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Seán Hewitt is an award-winning Irish poet and novelist whose debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, received the Lauren Prize. He writes about grief, hope, nature, and gay awakening. He was also listed in the Sunday Times’ “30 under 30” artists in Ireland, and his memoir, All Down Darkness Wide won the Rooney Prize for Irish literature.
Hewitt’s 2020 Tongues of Fire collects poems that express grief and loss with a musicality and grace about the strangeness of the natural world. Hewitt’s father died of metastasized brain cancer on the day Hewitt signed the contract for this book. Naming the book after a rust fungus that infects juniper branches and expands to hawthorn trees, Hewitt wrote for the Irish Times: “I wanted to explore the places where nature, the body, and something beyond the body, meld together, speak to each other or of each other. Where does matter come from? Where does the physical world start, and where does something beyond the physical, observable world begin?”
Lamenting his father’s illness, Hewitt candidly explores both the physicality of the world but also the spiritual with a meditative vision. Poems about grief accompany those about life, hope, and renewal, with a religious bent within his collection of prayers, hymns, incantations, and long poems. The book ends with a series of elegies for his father. Harry Cochrane in TLS. Times Literary Supplement called Hewitt’s translations from the medieval Irish tale, Buile Suibhne, exciting, saying: “Hewitt’s Suibhnean songs are the most salient hints that a dramatic voice does him more credit than the meditative.” Commenting on the quality of Hewitt’s poems, Cochrane remarked: “Line breaks are muted and hard rhythms absent; the pentameters quoted above are exceptional.”
In 2022, Hewitt published his memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, which received the Rooney Prize for Irish literature. In an introspective manner, Hewitt writes about his coming of age as a gay man in a Catholic region, his self-imposed homophobia, and desire to feel “normal.” He credits two lovers and two poets for showing him an alternative. The most influential person in his life was Elias, a Swedish backpacker Hewitt met in Colombia. They moved to England for a while then to Sweden where Elias started showing signs of crippling depression and attempted suicide. At first Hewitt cared for Elias, but their relationship deteriorated and they split up. Hewitt also tracks the lives and careers of poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Karin Boye, both homosexual and both died young.
“Hewitt is unsparing in his depiction of the maelstrom of emotions experienced in looking after someone with depression,” declared Michael Arditti in Spectator, who added that the book is “an outstanding chronicle of a gay poet’s journey of self-discovery.” Michael Cart commented about Hewitt’s “coming-of-age themes and lyrical prose” in Booklist saying: “Happily, his book is anything but normal; it is extraordinary and simply unforgettable. Bravo!” A Kirkus Reviews critic declared: “This memoir is a heartbreaking disquisition…on the unattainability of permanence, and it features one beautiful scene after another.”
In an interview with Thomas Bolger in Port magazine, Hewitt spoke of his isolation growing up gay and how he could safely express himself: “I think sometimes the figuring out of who you are often comes after you come out, because you don’t need to hide anymore. But to begin to unpack the perceived inherent morality of certain ideas and figure out how far that morality applies to your vision of the world… It’s quite a big step to begin to construct your own moral system.”
Hewitt published his debut novel, Open, Heaven, in 2025, about sexual awakening and the fear of first love. In 2022, narrator James Legh visits his hometown and remembers his first crush. In 2002 James is 16 and has recently come out as gay, but his small village of Thornmere in northern England disapproves. He meets 17-year-old Luke who has moved in with his aunt and uncle after his father went to prison and his mother ran away to France with another man. James is obsessed with Luke, who doesn’t mind being James’ best friend but who catches the eyes of teenage girls. Luke’s ambiguous sexuality is maddening for James who fights his own shame and need for affection and acceptance.
“Anchored by a grounded sense of place and the universal theme of adolescent longing, Hewitt’s narrative strikes a resonant chord. It’s a stunner,” declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer. In Kirkus Reviews, a contributor noted: “This is a poet’s novel, with as much nature writing as action and dialogue,” calling the book “A queer coming-of-age novel that achieves rare peaks of lyricism and emotional intensity.” The book addresses asymmetrical love, but “While the novel is full of beautiful surfaces, it never gives these boys any sense of particularity; we don’t know what draws them to each other. This is the problem with unrelenting rapture: It can become generic and impersonal, even solipsistic,” according to Charlie Lee in New York Times Book Review.
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2022, Michael Cart, review of All Down Darkness Wide, p. 2.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2022, review of All Down Darkness Wide; March 1, 2025, review of Open, Heaven.
New York Times Book Review, May 25, 2025, Charlie Lee, review of Open, Heaven, p. 16.
Publishers Weekly, January 20, 2025, review of Open, Heaven, p. 32.
Spectator, August 6. 2022, Michael Arditti, review of All Down Darkness Wide, p. 36.
TLS. Times Literary Supplement, October 16, 2020, Harry Cochrane, review of Tongues of Fire, p. 11.
ONLINE
Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (April 23, 2020), Sean Hewitt, “Seán Hewitt: I Would Give All My Poems to Have My Father Back.”
Port, https://www.port-magazine.com/ (July 11, 2022), Thomas Bolger, “All Down Darkness Wide.”
Sean Hewitt website, https://www.seanehewitt.com/ (October 1, 2025).
Seán Hewitt is a poet, memoirist, novelist and literary critic.
His debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their "30 under 30" artists in Ireland.
His book J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism was published with Oxford University Press (2021).
His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in non-fiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Polari Prize, the Michel Déon Prize, and for a LAMBDA award. He won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022.
300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World, illustrated by Luke Edward Hall, was published in 2023. A second collection of poetry, Rapture's Road, was published in 2024, and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. His work has been translated into more than 10 languages.
His debut novel, Open, Heaven, is forthcoming in Spring 2025.
He is Assistant Professor in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
You can read a selection of interviews and features here.
Seán Hewitt is Assistant Professor in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their "30 under 30" artists in Ireland.
His book J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism was published with Oxford University Press (2021).
His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in non-fiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and for a LAMBDA award, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022.
The anthology 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World, illustrated by Luke Edward Hall, was published by Penguin in 2023, and a second collection of poetry, Rapture's Road, was published by Cape in 2024.
His much-anticipated debut novel Open, Heaven, will be published in April 2025 by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Knopf in the US, and translation rights have been sold in seven territories so far.
Website
Agent: Matthew Marland
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Seán Hewitt
FRSL
Born 1990
Warrington, Cheshire, England
Occupation Poet, lecturer, critic
Nationality British, Irish
Citizenship British, Irish
Education University of Cambridge
University of Liverpool
Genre Poetry
Literary criticism
Notable works Tongues of Fire
All Down Darkness Wide
Notable awards Rooney Prize for Irish Literature
The Laurel Prize
Eric Gregory Award
Resurgence Prize
Website
www.seanehewitt.com
Seán Hewitt FRSL (born 1990) is a poet, lecturer and literary critic.[1] In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[2]
Biography
Seán Hewitt was born in Warrington, UK, to an Irish mother and English father.[3] He studied English at Girton College, Cambridge.[4][5]
Hewitt received his PhD, on the works of J. M. Synge, from the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool.[6] He lives in Dublin, where he lectures at Trinity College Dublin.[7]
Hewitt was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2019, and won the world's biggest ecopoetry award, the Resurgence Prize, in 2017.[8][9] He also received a Northern Writers' Award in 2016.[10] Hewitt was listed as one of The Sunday Times "30 under 30" artists in Ireland in 2020.[11] His debut collection of poems, Tongues of Fire, won The Laurel Prize in 2021. He was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022.[12]
Works
Hewitt's debut collection, Tongues of Fire, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2020.[13][14]
Tongues of Fire was released to critical acclaim.[15] It won The Laurel Prize in 2021,[16] and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, 2020, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, 2021, and the Dalkey Literary Award (Emerging Writer), 2021.[17][18][19] It was Poetry Book of the Month in The Observer,[20] and a Book of the Year in The Guardian,[21] The Irish Times,[22] The Spectator,[23] Attitude,[24] and the Irish Independent,[25] and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.[26] The Sunday Times wrote of Hewitt that "his poetry will stand the test of time".[27] Booker Prize shortlisted novelist Max Porter describes Hewitt as "an exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet, reverential in nature and gorgeously wise in the field of human drama."[28] Tongues of Fire is a book of lyric poetry, and explores queer sexuality, grief, and the natural world.[29][30][31]
Hewitt's book-length study of the Irish playwright, poet and travel writer J. M. Synge, J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism, was published by Oxford University Press.[32]
Hewitt's memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, was published in 2022.[33]
Hewitt's first novel, Open, Heaven, was published in 2025 by Alfred A. Knopf in New York and by Jonathan Cape in London.[34]
Hewitt was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Take Four Books on 25 May 2025, a programme in which the guest, an author, talks about his/her latest work, in this case Open, Heaven, and the three other texts that have been influential, which for him were The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley, Maurice by E. M. Forster, and The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien. [35]
Awards
Northern Writers' Award, New Writing North, 2016.
The Resurgence Prize, Poetry School, 2017.[36][37]
Maurice J. Bric Medal of Excellence, Irish Research Council, 2019.[38]
Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice, for Lantern, 2019.[39]
Eric Gregory Award, Society of Authors, 2019.
Poetry Book Society Recommendation, for Tongues of Fire, 2020.[26]
Shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, for Tongues of Fire, 2020.[40]
Shortlisted for the Dalkey Literary Award (Emerging Writer), 2021.
Shortlisted for John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, for Tongues of Fire, 2021.
Winner of The Laurel Prize, 2021.
Winner of The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, 2022.
Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, for Rapture's Road, 2025.[41]
Bibliography
Poetry
Lantern (Offord Road Books, 2019)
Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape, 2020)
Buile Suibhne / Seán Hewitt, wood engravings by Amy Jeffs (Rochdale, England: Fine Press Poetry, 2021)
300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World, with Luke Edward Hall (Penguin, 2023)
Rapture's Road (Jonathan Cape, 2024)
Critical studies
J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Memoirs
All Down Darkness Wide (Jonathan Cape (UK) and Penguin Press (USA), 2022)
Novels
Open, Heaven (Penguin Books, 2025)
Seán Hewitt
Ireland (b.1990)
Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. His debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2020. Tongues of Fire won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their "30 under 30" artists in Ireland.
His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (2022), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022, and was shortlisted for a LAMBDA Award, Foyles Book of the Year (Non-Fiction), the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and an Irish Book Award.
A collaboration with the artist Luke Edward Hall, his fourth book is 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World (2023).
His second collection of poetry, Rapture's Road, will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2024.
He lives in Dublin, where he teaches at Trinity College.
Genres: Literary Fiction
Novels
Open, Heaven (2025)
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Collections
Lantern (poems) (2019)
Tongues of Fire (poems) (2020)
Rapture's Road (poems) (2024)
thumbthumbthumb
Anthologies edited
Ten Poems from the Countryside (2021)
300,000 Kisses (2023) (with Luke Edward Hall)
thumbthumb
Non fiction hide
All Down Darkness Wide (2022)
Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. His debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2020. Tongues of Fire won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their "30 under 30" artists in Ireland.
His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (2022), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022, and was shortlisted for a LAMBDA Award, Foyles Book of the Year (Non-Fiction), the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and an Irish Book Award.
A collaboration with the artist Luke Edward Hall, his fourth book is 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World (2023).
His second collection of poetry, Rapture's Road, will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2024.
He lives in Dublin, where he teaches at Trinity College.
Seán Hewitt: I would give all my poems to have my father back
My father died the day I signed the contract for my book Tongues of Fire
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Seán Hewitt on Tongues of Fire: The fungus is emblematic of many of the poems in the book. Photograph: Bríd O’Donovan
Seán Hewitt on Tongues of Fire: The fungus is emblematic of many of the poems in the book. Photograph: Bríd O’Donovan
Seán Hewitt
Thu Apr 23 2020 - 06:00
On the cover of Tongues of Fire, there is an image of a rust fungus. Gymnosporangium clavariiforme, or Tongues of Fire. This fungus infects juniper branches. Then, in the second stage of its cycle, the spores are lifted on the wind and latch onto hawthorn trees, causing the berries to grow white tubes.
In other words, it has a sort of primary and secondary growth. Like a cancer, it metastasises. It can’t go unnoticed that these are tongues, speaking from the branch, something sacred becoming physical, something spiritual pushing out into the matter of the world, something unspoken being given voice.
My father became ill unexpectedly in February last year. First, there were intense shooting pains in his head, numbing his face, keeping him up at night in a frenzy of pain. Then, after some scans, he was diagnosed with stage-4 cancer. He died on the same day that I signed the contract for Tongues of Fire.
And so I have a strange relationship with the book itself – it is, in many ways, a testament to that grief, and to confusion. The final quarter of the book was written in those final three or four months. I would give all my poems to have him back. And so it’s hard, in a way, not to resent their existence. They were born out of his dying; but I am learning, slowly, to forgive them.
That fungus, as well, is emblematic of many of the poems in the book – it came, for me, to speak of some boundary I was working away at without at first being fully conscious of it. I wanted to explore the places where nature, the body, and something beyond the body, meld together, speak to each other or of each other. Where does matter come from? Where does the physical world start, and where does something beyond the physical, observable world begin?
When my father was dying, I became acutely aware of a sense that everything was somehow synthetic, that the world was full of passage, discourse, things moving from one place to another, growing and dying, being born and then being taken back.
The final poems in the book are not elegies, but pre-elegies; they anticipate the moment of dying and try to give voice to that liminal place. In Tree of Jesse, one of the longer poems, I am writing to my father: “my head/ already is haunted with you./ I have become a living afterlife.”
The natural world is full of bodies, full of things constantly in motion, at work. Like a poem, nature pulls things up from the earth and brings those things into new form and meaning. Poems, I think, are the artefacts of our mind, just as trees, or birds, are the artefacts of history, biology, weather, all those things we might think of as the mind of the world. Each is an inflection of it, some moving part of the greater whole.
And so, really, artefact isn’t quite the word – these are not static, but thinking things. They shift in new contexts, taking on new forms, new senses of self.
The second part of Tongues of Fire is a series of poems that tells the story of Suibhne (or Sweeney), the famous king of Irish legend, who was cursed, and lived among the treetops. When I placed them after the book’s first section, which is set mostly in Sweden (where I lived for some years) the poems from Buile Suibhne took on echoes, and the middle Irish tale came to seem much more queer than it did when it was in its original context.
Suibhne, at one point, flies to Britain and meets another madman, Fer Caille, and the two spend a year caring for each other. Fer Caille sings, “O Suibhne, let’s keep guard/ over each other, now/ that we have found ourselves.” I thought there was something so beautiful in that – finding another person who didn’t “complete” you (as the old cliche goes) but who let you find yourself; the idea that we become whole in community not by outsourcing ourselves, but by deepening ourselves.
Unlike other translations of this text, mine is not complete. Instead, I wanted to lift the lyric moments from the narrative, the moments in which Suibhne feels most isolated, most in love, most regretful. In fact, some of the poems are completely invented, and are not translations at all; others are amalgamations of pieces of text which I’ve sewn together in my own way. In one of them, Suibhne realises he is dying, and sings a song that walks along the tightrope of love and selfhood:
I used to think
that the chanting of the mountain-grouse
at dawn had more music than your voice,
but things are different now. Still,
it would be hard to say I wouldn't rather
live above the bright lake, and eat watercress
in the wood, and be away from sorrow.
I have two poetic fascinations. The first is a poetry of the body, and this is an inheritance from queer writers. From Mark Doty, Danez Smith and Andrew McMillan. But I also have a passion for the natural world seen slant, from poets such as Alice Oswald, Jos Charles and Gerard Manley Hopkins. For me, these two are never distinct. The body is the receptor, the locus of all of the poems here because they are, quite necessarily, all focused through my body. And so, in Tongues of Fire, the natural world is also a queer world, a bodily world.
A fair few of the poems in Tongues of Fire deal with sex, and the growing into sex and shame that queer people experience. Someone once remarked that a lot of my poems are set at night. They weren’t wrong. Night-time comes with adulthood – the freedom to walk about after dark, to go to clubs, to meet people unexpectedly. It comes with a new sensuality and sexuality.
The senses work differently: the night is quiet, but full of sounds, and is linked with a sort of nerve-raising potential. It is, for me, also an inversion of the world I grew up knowing. The night-time is a sort of counter-world, an alternative map, a film-negative of the day.
The lyric poem – its patterning, its rhyme, its insistent “I” – has for me a beauty that is perhaps unfashionable, and might seem to make it isolated from the political imperative. But it is my wager that in speaking of ourselves, we will find readers who share something of that emotion, that experience, that flash of strange perspective. In other words, it is my contention that no poem is ever isolated, if it is done right.
The great Muriel Rukeyser asked, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” And I think that could be said again. What would happen if a queer person told the truth about their life? Maybe the world might be queerer, might be (in the words of Hopkins) more “counter, original, spare, strange”, than we previously thought.
Tongues of Fire is published today by Jonathan Cape
Seán Hewitt: Trinity’s Rising Literary Star
Hewitt’s memoir All Down Darkness Wide is set to be published in summer 2022.
Caoimhe Weakliam
Literature Editor
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In the sea of impressive and successful characters housed in Trinity’s English department, Seán Hewitt is a particularly remarkable individual. Akin to the likes of Batman or Hannah Montana, he lives out the best of both worlds as an academic and a writer. As well as being an English Literature lecturer, he is an established poet whose debut collection Tongues of Fire has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020. He also recently announced a forthcoming memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, with Jonathan Cape, that is set for release in 2022.
Clearly a man of many talents, Hewitt humbly admits, in conversation with The University Times, that his most recent project has been a daunting venture. All Down Darkness Wide is a memoir that will also look at two other poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Swedish Modernist poet Corinne Boyer.
Adjusting from poetry to prose – which, at a very basic level, simply requires significantly more words – has been difficult for Hewitt. “There are so many places to doubt yourself along the way”, he says. And, for the rising literary star, the book’s release is daunting in and of itself, the writing of it aside: “I think by the end of the book people will know more about me than I probably feel comfortable with.”
I think by the end of the book people will know more about me than I probably feel comfortable with
The memoir will reflect on what it’s like to grow up not being straight in a heterosexual-oriented world, with a view to prompting people to think about how this experience might alter the development of a young person’s character. Despite Hewitt’s reluctance to be so publicly vulnerable, he admits that the more he delves into the memoir, “the angrier I’m getting – the more I feel compelled to actually make a difference”.
Throughout our conversation, Hewitt is careful not to say too much about what the finished product of his memoir will look like, as he isn’t entirely certain himself. What began as a novel-writing project to fill his empty evenings living alone in New York in 2018, gradually revealed itself to Hewitt as a non-fiction book exploring his own life. “It’s been about three different books already, which is why I’m reluctant to say where it will end up”, Hewitt explains. “I’m letting it teach me along the way what it wants to look like.”
Aside from Hewitt’s new prose writing endeavour, he is also among this year’s shortlist for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for his poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which comprises poems reflecting on nature and mortality. The debut poetry book has done much better than Hewitt “ever thought it would”, having received exceptional praise and reviews, and placing him as the only poet on this year’s shortlist for the Young Writer of the Year award. “It’s particularly nice because poetry doesn’t often get mainstream readership”, Hewitt adds, explaining his delight that a judging panel which didn’t include any poets enjoyed his book as much as they did.
It’s been about three different books already … I’m letting it teach me along the way what it wants to look like
Though Hewitt’s current focus is on his memoir, he comments that poetry will always be the form he values the most. His interest in writing prose is fuelled by his acceptance of poetry’s limits, he says. Elaborating on this, he refers to the smaller readership that poetry draws, and the shorter amount of time spent with the reader: “If you want to, as I do in this case, make an argument and get people to listen to you, I think prose is the way”.
It is tempting to wonder whether Hewitt felt a clash between his careers as both an academic and a creative writer. But he says that he finds the two to have a symbiotic relationship. His academic reading feeds into his creative process, he tells me, often sparking ideas for poetry.
One must be strategic with their time, however, as Hewitt has found that academic works can “subsume everything, and that’s the danger with them – they can become tyrants”. Hewitt is part of the way through writing his second academic book but contends that it has been put on the back burner until his memoir is finished.
As Hewitt’s first year in a teaching position, what does he have to say about Trinity? Only good things it seems: “I love the students and it’s nice to be able to talk about literature all day, it’s a privilege.” During our Zoom call, he points to a wall of empty bookshelves behind him which line his new office, joking about how his recent working days have involved “bringing in a bag of books a day” as he moves in.
Seán Hewitt’s debut poetry collection Tongues of Fire is available to purchase from all good bookshops.
Working with Words: Seán Hewitt
Farfetch and Zegna explore modern masculinity with the award-winning poet
All clothing Ermenegildo Zegna
“I am large, I contain multitudes”, wrote Walt Whitman in his seminal poem ‘Song of Myself’, and indeed, most can lay claim to this statement. Assumptions of character traits based on people’s gender, or assigned sex at birth, often fall short of reality. We are simply too complex for binaries. However, what does masculinity mean today? Its toxic qualities are easier to identify and are increasingly being called out, but what does a progressive version of it look like? What new opportunities do men have to communicate, to grow? Together with Port, Farfetch and Zegna have partnered to create two short films with poet Seán Hewitt and musician Azekel, exploring the subject as well as a recital of a text they’ve penned.
Port caught up with Hewitt – whose debut collection, Tongues of Fire, won The Laurel Prize – to discuss his chosen work ‘Ilex’, the consequences of men denying their fragility, and writing as a means of investigation.
Why is poetry your artistic medium? What sets it apart from other modes of communication, literature, expression?
Fundamentally I write poetry because I like its mystery. I like the fact that rhythm and music and rhyme and language all play together. Often when you write a poem, you don’t know where it’s going and you find something out by the time you get there. I think of the poem as connecting two things that wouldn’t be connected otherwise and you basically ask the question, what happens if we connect them? So it feels like discovery to me.
Why do you often pair the natural world with the poetry of the body? What magic happens when the two meet?
I often think of using the natural world or looking through the natural world and back to the body as a way of rethinking what the body can be, or what nature – which is really the rest of the world – can teach us about being human, or what it might mean to be human. If we were to look at a question and ask, for example, ‘what would a piece of holly teach us about this?’, we come at it in such a strange way, a way that’s outside of our usual way of thinking. A poem might begin thinking about a piece of fungus, and if you turn that back and look at life or love or the body, you often begin to ask different questions and think how are things connected. Of course, as a poet, you think everything is connected.
I like the idea of poetry as a mode of investigation. The poem is beautiful by the way – why did you choose this text with masculinity in mind? Why is it important to you?
I chose this poem thinking about masculinity for a number of reasons. One, because it’s basically a really old-fashioned occasional poem, written on the birth of my nephew. But I was wondering, what would I wish for a young boy now? And it was the ability to retain vulnerability, the ability to be fragile. To bring into being a man or masculinity, where all these things that are often seen as weaknesses, might actually be blessings, in a way. Another reason that I like this poem is because originally when I wrote it, I sent it out to an editor, anonymously. My name wasn’t attached and they thought it was by a woman, and I liked the idea then that inside the space of a poem, I’m almost androgynous. Once you connect my name with that poem, people read it differently, but there’s nothing instinctively masculine or feminine about the person I am inside the poem. It made me think perhaps I’m not a static masculine identity, that inside the poem I have a freedom that perhaps I don’t have elsewhere.
What are the consequences of denying the fragility you highlight in the poem?
Psychoanalysis tells you that you can’t bury anything successfully. Often what we’re asked to do is distraction or rechanneling that emotion into some other outlet, and eventually they catch up with us. We see often men dealing with the outcomes of that emotion or experience catching up. One nice thing about poetry or being an artist is that you get the chance to sit down with those emotions in a private way and figure them out as best you can, on your own, and then share them. I think that that is a connection between a writer and a reader or a singer and a listener – that you create this space where we can communicate with each other in ways that we don’t often do.
Roger Robinson said that poetry is an opportunity to practice your humanity with others. It’s a way to empathise, a vehicle to access other bodies, other states of mind. What would you say are some of the biggest challenges for men in communicating today? What can be done to remedy this?
It is a big question. My sense of it is, and this is probably because I’m not immune to it, I don’t think anyone is immune to it…There is a feeling that anything that we do feel might be particular to ourselves. I think the more we talk, the more we read, the more we listen, the more we learn that nothing is particular to any given person. No matter how embarrassing the thing you might want to say feels, it’s never embarrassing to the person who hears it, because they recognise something of themselves in it. That’s why in a poem or in a song, I can say I was doing this, this is about my nephew, this happened to me on this particular time. And anyone else can read it and see something of themselves in it. So nothing is a particular unique experience. It always has an element of universality if you tell it honestly. I think the fear of that isolation, or being the only one, is what holds people back from speaking. But the more we speak, the more we realise we’re not alone or isolated at all.
We’re living in a different world to our fathers and grandfathers. What opportunities do we as a younger generation of men have when it comes to defining and expressing ourselves?
We live in a world where people are beginning to be a bit more open about what masculinity or femininity mean, and whether we need those categories. Or, what it might mean to express oneself in a way outside what we think of as those categories. And that feels like a great freedom to me. We have technology, we have different jobs available. We have a whole history behind us, of men wearing makeup, you know, our parents grew up in the 70s, 80s. They shouldn’t be shocked! So maybe we should be a bit braver in doing whatever we want and expressing ourselves in different ways, because we’ve come a long way. I think grabbing hold of that freedom, making use of it, is what we should do. We should be brave enough to do that.
Are binary terms like masculinity and femininity, where we ascribe qualities based on gender, relevant anymore? Do you think masculinity can be a force for good and if so, in what way? What would it look like?
It’s hard to say what is a masculine trait and what is a feminine trait. In my mind when I begin to list what I think of as masculine traits, I think of so many women that display them. If I were to imagine an ideal masculinity, it would be one that was vulnerable, emotional. In fact, that borrows many aspects of stereotypical femininity. I think it would probably be a blended identity, because any polarised thing, any binary, is inevitably going to lack what the other thing has. An ideal always has to be a kind of compromise between the two. So yes – vulnerability, creativity, the freedom to express oneself, no fear of showing emotion, care for other people. That’s something I’d like future men and masculinity to exhibit. It must be widely defined enough that anyone can fit into it.
If I were to think about strength, I immediately think of my mother, if I was thinking about vulnerability I would immediately think about my father. That may be personally unique, but I’m sure it applies to many people. Good parents will have those blended identities. Speaking of – how is your nephew? How old is he?
He’s four, and he’s well. Apparently it’s quite common for a couple of weeks for it to be hard to get children to breastfeed. He’s absolutely fine. He’s a terror.
As his uncle, what lessons or qualities would you like to pass on to him?
It’s quite a nice role to be an uncle because you get to have fun and to steal children away for a day or so, and not have a great deal of responsibility. He’s very imaginative, so I like to play creatively with him. He loves to make up stories and I buy him books and read to him. He paints, runs around, dresses up, he just has that freedom and play that I think we lose too quickly. I would like him to get the most out of that and hold onto it as long as he can. At least until the world drums it out of him!
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All Down Darkness Wide
July 11, 2022 Thomas Bolger
Seán Hewitt discusses his masterful new memoir
Seán Hewitt. All photography Stuart Simpson / Penguin Random House
How may you love someone when they no longer love themselves? What spectral palimpsests do people leave behind? How does it feel to emerge after hiding from the heteronormative world’s “tacit disdain”? These are the central questions in All Down Darkness Wide, a masterful new book by poet, teacher and critic Seán Hewitt. The memoir radically reimagines the form through a non-linear structure, deliciously Gothic atmosphere, and meditations on poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Karin Boye. Rather than detract from its emotional core – the love story between Hewitt and previous partner Elias, and the latter’s total descent into depression – these academic reflections interlink with the book’s examination of queer belonging, Catholicism, shame, art and grief, illustrating that literature is an active, resonate medium that reaches out across time to the discerning reader. Hewitt’s transition to prose is astonishing; his observation and self-reflection so immediate and intimate, his longing so lyrical, that it reads like a modern fiction classic.
To celebrate its publication by Penguin Press this week, Port spoke to the award-winning writer about sensual Christianity, inter-textual haunting, and memoir as unsupervised therapy.
We begin in a Neo-Gothic setting, communing with ghosts, haunted by phantoms of the city, of loved ones – could you talk about the role ghosts play in the book?
I open in the graveyard and use this mode that runs throughout because the Gothic is a good way of making history porous. I read quite a lot in this genre – for teaching as well as enjoyment – and I love the way in which the past erupts through the material world of the present. I wanted this to be a memoir that didn’t just begin with me, and it was good way of opening up to history, where ghosts could freely come and go, guide me, teach me.
Even though a memoir is usually contained to the factual world, I didn’t see the Gothic or ghosts as anything particularly unreal to the way that we experience the world. Sometimes you have this sense of history pressing in on you, of repeating the past, echoing people, tapping into cycles. It all seemed a worryingly truthful way of getting into the subject. As I was writing, gathering these ghosts along the way, I had a Sixth Sense realisation towards the end where I thought, maybe the final ghost is me?
You write movingly about a paradoxical interconnectedness within the queer community, but also the isolation. In your early life, how difficult was it to emerge out of that shadow of heteronormative contempt when you were figuring out how to safely express who you were, dismantle the twisted notion that pleasure deserves punishment, separate the armour you had accumulated from who you were? Is this a lifelong process?
It’s ongoing. It’s a cliche to say that some people almost have this postponed adolescence, but I think sometimes the figuring out of who you are often comes after you come out, because you don’t need to hide anymore. But to begin to unpack the perceived inherent morality of certain ideas and figure out how far that morality applies to your vision of the world… It’s quite a big step to begin to construct your own moral system.
Especially when you had previously been using the framework of Catholicism…
I mean, Catholicism is quite gay (laughs). I remember reading medieval literature at university, particularly the female mystics – Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe – and the sublimation of sexuality into religious thought seems to set a very big precedent for this kind of sensual Christianity that followed. My good theologian friend here at Trinity put it very succinctly when he said Christianity is a history of the possibilities of material form, in terms of, how much is the body spiritual? How much is the bread, the Eucharist, inhabited by God? Gerard Manley Hopkins seemed to be a great person to pull into the book because of how much he sublimates sexuality into the body of Christ and then by extension through almost everything in the world.
There are many things to love in this book and my biggest hope is that it gets more people reading Hopkins, who is one of my favourite poets. He is a central figure in the memoir – why do you have this affinity with a “counter, original, spare, strange” Jesuit priest who was writing 150 years ago? I suppose he’s always been a bit of a time traveler, as his work was only properly picked up after the first world war.
Yes he’s good at jumping in and out of time, given he was received almost as a modernist. In bear terms we have followed each other. He moved from Oxford to Liverpool, I had done Cambridge to Liverpool, and when I was there I was aware of his presence, even though he’s still an under-appreciated figure. And then I moved to Dublin and of course, so did he. He would’ve lived about 400 meters up the road from my office here, I feel like I cross him regularly. So, geographically I followed in his footsteps – he’ll be getting out a restraining order for me soon! I find him and his work fascinating.
I was raised atheist, and yet sections of The Windhover or As Kingfisher’s Catch Fire move me so deeply, I think because I see God, or what people perhaps may think is God, in the natural world… Having read your previous work, it’s no surprise the pastoral, the seasons, the flora in the world sing. You capture these natural phenomena so beautifully – how did you approach writing about them in a prose, rather than poetry?
I think a poet like me is always going to have the tendency to want to overwrite and rhapsodise, because the poetic mode is often ‘here is one thing that we are noticing and let’s get as much detail out of that as possible’. Whereas you can be much sparer in prose because you don’t want to overload the reader with pure description. So I did pull back in that sense. What I wanted most of all was to conjure up atmospheres for the reader, painting the backdrop before I added the figures in foreground. Moving to prose, you’re thinking on a massive canvas, and I found that difficult. It was almost impossible to hold the reader’s entire experience in my head and make sure that I was orchestrating it well. I guess I treated it as a massive poem and kept to the idea of recurring images or ideas. Even if a reader doesn’t necessarily pick them up, I needed them there to structure it.
There’s a wonderful self-deprecating line when you talk about the “irritating habit” of poets “turning life into metaphor, with all the added self-grandeur of a postponed adolescence”. Do you think your tools as a poet and academic makes you more sensitive to analysing, diving deeper into everyday things, reading them as omens, metaphors, similes, imbuing them with greater meaning… or am I making it sound quite worthy!
No, I mean, there are two sides of the coin. One of them is a sense of shame and embarrassment that I think is integral to being a writer, because you have to take something seriously, which is deeply uncool and the thing that opened you up to mockery all the way through your life. If I sat in the pub and said the things that I say in the memoir, I would expect to be roasted. This is something that comes up often when I read from my work. The second I get home, I’m mortified that I’ve done it. The second Seán comes and in castigates the earnest Seán.
As a poet, you can get into a habit of when something happens to you, willing yourself to remember it, recording it over experiencing it, so you can use it. That can be a dangerous way to live, but being a writer trains you into that. The process for this memoir was almost like researching my own life. At the same time, when I sat down to write, I didn’t know what would come out onto the page. But eventually, little memories begin to seep back to the surface, because you disturb the sediment of your mind. And if you do it for long enough, over time, unfortunately you have to live in these murky depths.
Putting aside discussion of craft, emotionally it must have been an incredibly difficult process. Because you’re in the sediment, looking underneath the rock, at lives and loves lost…
The problem is that it’s kind of unsupervised therapy in which you are playing both therapist and patient, but you’re not trained. It is a difficult, inefficient process. I also found a type of guilt as you become a puppet master of your memories. You have to stage your life, narrativise it, to make it work as literature. I had to always keep in mind that what I was doing was writing a book, I wasn’t therapising myself, even if that might have been a side product of it.
You articulate the darkness cast over a person with severe depression, but also the tremors they create around them and the people who care about them the most, very keenly… When I spoke to Roger Robinson about what care poetry needs to take when working with ‘real life’ he replied ‘When things truly happened, you have to honour the moment… If you move in a spirit of honouring the best of the person or event you’re writing about, then hopefully it will come out true.” What care did you take, for yourself, and the people you were writing about, in honouring the difficult things that happened? Because memoir is a vulnerable form.
I was completely unprepared for the toll of a book like this. Last year was not easy because I found that I had made real again things that were in the past. I had somehow conjured up the mental weather of that time, and I don’t want to valorise the suffering writer stereotype, but that’s what happened.
One way of protecting myself and others was to fictionalise certain elements so long as it didn’t affect the reading experience. That brought it into a safer space for the real people involved. I guess the other thing is that the book is not written out of a place of anything but love for everyone in it. That makes it easier to write, because if a book is motivated by anger or vengeance, I imagine it makes it much more difficult to pen.
Are you familiar with Jack Spicer’s After Lorca? I was struck by many parallels with your book. It is a text that is essentially an imagined dialogue between the 20th century San Francisco poet Spicer and the then deceased Federico García Lorca, made of up letters between the two, and Spicer’s translations of Lorca’s work. I read it as a work of queer longing for something that is impossible, and yet through the medium of writing, possible. Is All Down Darkness Wide also a love story in this vein, and has writing it given cathartic shape to your loss, made the impossible, possible?
It has, yes, and I would say this is a book about longing in many ways. That inter-textual haunting element you mention sounds similar, wherein haunting is a longing through time, of someone in the past like Hopkins, who you feel that you might complete the longing of. I think that’s quite a powerful energy. One of Hopkins’ dark Dublin sonnet’s opening lines is “To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life among strangers”. The final lines are: “This to hoard unheard, heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.” I think of that end line a lot because he might have been unheard or unheeded in his life, but so long as I hear him, he’s not a lonely began. If I listen, he may begin. There’s a way of completing the loop through literature. That’s what a reader can offer a writer. Even over a great expanse of time, they can allow them to be heard.
It is my hope that anyone reading the memoir who is struggling with depression or living with someone who has it, or anyone trying to define who they are, will felt seen, understood, and have some light enter their life.
I hope so too. It’s complete a cliche to say I wrote the book I wish I had when I was younger, but I spent a long time looking for a book that would help in the situations in which this memoir finds itself.
Seán Hewitt on translating "revolutionarily normal" queer stories
Updated / Wednesday, 6 Dec 2023 16:19
Seán Hewitt: "I definitely saw myself in this book as a sort of conduit"
Seán Hewitt: "I definitely saw myself in this book as a sort of conduit"
Charlotte Ryan By Charlotte Ryan
Lifestyle
Speaking about his last work, his Gothic-inspired memoir All Down Darkness Wide over a recent Zoom call, Seán Hewitt said he had a clear vision for that book, one borne in his own struggles. "It sounds corny, but the sort of book I wish I could have read at the time, I found it really difficult to find anything that was honest and unafraid of kind of putting across the difficulties of either going through a depression or being alongside it."
The memoir, which won Hewitt the Rooney Prize for Literature in 2022, is a rich and devastating read, but one that is laced through with moments of joy and love, as well as endurance.
"I do also get the sense sometimes when I you know, when people are about to read it, that I kind of feel myself and go, okay, good luck. I want to kind of warn them a little bit about what's inside because I know it might be quite difficult if you're not in the best place when you start it."
With his latest work, 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World - a collaboration with illustrator Luke Edward Hall - Hewitt expands his self-made library of queer reference books. Where the memoir explored the darknesses that often haunt queer people, 300,000 Kisses illuminates a lost shared past, buffing that forgotten touchstone to a brilliant shine.
Here, he speaks about the importance of language in translation, revelling in the ordinariness of queer love and restoring queer identity and sexuality to the pinnacle of culture.
This interview has been condensed for clarity.
What did you want to create when you joined the project?
I definitely saw myself in this book as a sort of conduit, a channel for it to come out into the world. I think both Luke and I felt very strongly that a lot of people are raised with a question about their place in history or a sense of their forebears, which will give you a sense of belonging. People can often be raised with a sense of loneliness, which is kind of part of All Down Darkness Wide, which comes from feeling, I say in the prologue to the book, unmoored in history, not having a place or a literature or seeing those things as a recent development in culture.
We have queer literature from the 20th century and the 21st. It's more difficult to go back. So I very much wanted this book to be, in a way, an opportunity to give a past or a history back to people, to let them have access to it, to show a lot of variety in the way that we think about sexuality and gender. And also, we felt quite strongly that this was a book that in some way embarrassed our current level of debate on some issues such as gender identity and stuff. When you put them in the context of a 2,500-year literary and cultural tradition, it starts to sound very silly and petty and parochial.
Listen - 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World - Sean Hewitt talks to RTÉ Arena
When it comes to translation, what did you learn about their message when viewed through the lens of what language we use and choosing the right word?
It's a really interesting question, and one that we grappled with a lot when we were writing the book. It's not so easy to use any of the language that we have for sexuality to describe sexuality. In the ancient world, there were obviously people that were attracted to people of the same sex, but whether they would see themselves as gay no, they wouldn't. That was why we went for the word "queer", as well, in the title of the book. We found that it was a bit more flexible and pliable.
One thing that we found was that some of us knew these stories before, but either the context had been taken away from the story, so we didn't know it was a queer story. I grew up near Manchester, and in Manchester Art Gallery, there's John Waterhouse's painting of Hylas and the Nymphs, which is Hylas surrounded by a load of naked women being pulled into a pond. So I thought it was a heterosexual myth. But if you zoom the camera out, you realise that it's actually in the context of his lover looking for him and they're trying to get back to each other.
They're also texts from a culture with many issues. I wanted to be clear that this is not a utopian culture. It's very misogynistic. There were enslaved people. There were disenfranchised people. But what we wanted to do was give a full range of the emotional territory of love. So anger, jealousy, quite problematic power dynamics, and let it speak for itself. So we didn't really want to be in the business of censoring it again, this material, by trying to make it conform to our own standards.
The thing that I found was just how ordinary some of these stories were. Was that deliberate?
Yeah, it was one thing that I noticed as we were going through these texts, that in some of them there was an obvious shock factor where they wanted the reader to be shocked by something and in other things it was just a remark, a sideways comment, a bit of context, part of everyday life. And it's strange that that should appear kind of revolutionarily normal, but to me it did.
The purpose of this translation was to make the text accessible, vibrant, direct and normal in some ways. And so the language I used and the forms I used were all put in service of not wanting to take you out of that moment.
I think if I could sum up what this book taught me along the way, it would probably be perspective.
The impression that I got from All Down Darkness Wide was that it was you writing your way out of an assumption you'd been taught about what it was like to be queer, that all roads lead down to something terrible. Here, there's a lot of moments of rapturous joy. Was that something that you were conscious of, that this might be a lighter shade to the experience of queer people?
It was, in some ways a reckoning with my own history, but then with societal or cultural history. And I wanted that book to end at a point of light and possibility for remaking and starting again. And it seemed that 300,000 Kisses might be a good place to kind of go back to the start, to remake something, to give a different historical beginning and to base it in colour and joy and variety.
We're often taught that the classics are kind of the pinnacle of culture. And I think if anything subversive might be achieved by this book, it is that showing queer people that they are also integral to the highest culture and that they have a place there, and that that is a culture that is very different to our own.
Did it teach you anything about what it means to be queer, or give you a different understanding of your foundation in just human experience and just being part of the broader experience?
I think if I could sum up what this book taught me along the way, it would probably be perspective. And it's given me perspective not only on things I might still be ashamed or embarrassed about, it's given me historical perspective. It's also given me a good literary perspective in terms of literary history and the place that contemporary writers taken it. In some ways it's quite good to be reminded of your smallness in the grand scheme of things.
300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World is published by
TONGUES OF FIRE
SEAN HEWITT
80pp. Cape. Paperback, 10 [pounds sterling].
Sean Hewitt's debut collection of poems opens with "Leaf", the title of which links plant and page through the age-old pun. "For woods are forms of grief / grown from the earth", it begins. That grief quietly persists through Tongues of Fire, which develops over an elegiac chord while courting and catching glimpses of natural "theophany". In the bookending title poem, the poet spots a yellow fungus on a dozen junipers: "And I would say that I have come upon / the cones of God, the Pentecostal flame / fallen to the bush at night". But the fungus also recalls his father's cancer, "the blight on his frame", and he confesses the sin all poets share: "I have conjured meaning / when I have needed".
This candour is typical of Tongues of Fire, which pretends to artlessness. Line breaks are muted and hard rhythms absent; the pentameters quoted above are exceptional. The poems in general profit little from the page, their cadence tending towards organic breathing patterns, as in "Tree of Jesse": "For weeks now you have been / a rhythmic, breathing body--/ hardly waking, chest / like a bellows, inflating, deflating Such passages would sing in performance. On paper, though, Hewitt often does not know when to stop, and there are some moments, typified by the same poem, that the book could have done without: "Those who we love, and who die, / become gods to us. Our speech, / from that moment, is incantation"--less incantation, here, than oration. At the other extreme, the gentle tone of reportage that he favours can become bland: "The plants [wild garlic] are carrying / the smell, earth-rich, too heavy / to lift above head-height, and my boots / and jeans are bleached with it." Far more exciting are his translations from the Buile Suibhne, the middle-Irish narrative adapted here into propulsive little lyrics. "I live with the frost, sleep / in its bed, have for pillow / the rough, wind-driven snow", howls the mad birdman King Suibhne, although his wife Eorann consoles him: "Even if the prince himself led me / through halls banked with riches, / I'd rather sleep in a dark tree-hollow / with you, my husband, if you'd let me". Hewitt's Suibhnean songs are the most salient hints that a dramatic voice does him more credit than the meditative.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 NI Syndication Limited
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Cochrane, Harry. "TONGUES OF FIRE." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6133, 16 Oct. 2020, p. 11. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A639265826/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bec20844. Accessed 22 Aug. 2025.
Hewitt, Seán ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE Penguin Press (NonFiction None) $26.00 7, 12 ISBN: 978-0-593-30008-4
A poet recounts his relationship with a man suffering from paralyzing depression.
When Hewitt, who "was brought up vaguely Catholic," grew up in 1990s and 2000s England, he felt he needed to show "that I was good, that I was kind, that I followed the rules" because "I had a secret to keep." The secret was that he was gay at a time when the Catholic Church railed against an equal marriage rights bill passing through Parliament. That is only one of the many challenges Hewitt chronicles in this stunning memoir. The death of a boyfriend when Hewitt attended the University of Cambridge made him think of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poem "The Lantern Out of Doors" provides this book's title. Hopkins, a gay man and Dublin priest, is a primary influence in Hewitt's life. Hewitt frequently references him and "the boundaries blurring between Hopkins's work and the life I was in," especially during the narrative centerpiece: his post-Cambridge relationship with Elias, a young Swedish man he met on a trip to Colombia. The bulk of this book describes Elias and Hewitt's years together, first in Liverpool and then in Sweden, and Elias' descent from someone "confident and chatty and open" to a man who required an extended stay in a psychiatric hospital after contemplating suicide. Scenes in which Hewitt and others try to nurse Elias back to health are among the most memorable. This memoir is a heartbreaking disquisition on "ghosts" like Hopkins and on the unattainability of permanence, and it features one beautiful scene after another, from the patient at the psychiatric hospital who laments that his son never visits and, when he sees Hewitt, says, "I knew you'd come"; to Hewitt's own father, who, on his deathbed, confided, "All I want is my boys .As long as I can still be with my boys, and can still sit in the garden and hear the birds. That's all I want."
A profoundly moving meditation on queer identity, mental illness, and the fragility of life.
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"Hewitt, Sean: ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A703413890/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=83223b9f. Accessed 22 Aug. 2025.
All Down Darkness Wide. By Sean Hewitt. July 2022. 224p. Penguin, $26 (9780593300084). 306.
Even if readers don't know that British author Hewitt is an award-winning poet, they won't be surprised after encountering the beauty of his prose in this affecting memoir.
("The wood was singing itself awake under the sun.") Hewitt writes about a multiplicity of subjects, often in an introspective manner, but the chief focus is on his relationship with a young Swedish man named Elias. The two meet while they are traveling in Colombia and fall in love. They move together to Liverpool for a year while Sean is working on an academic degree and then move to Sweden, where the trouble starts. Elias begins to show signs of a deep depression that come to a head when he nearly kills himself and is hospitalized. When he is released, the two take a studio apartment, where Elias' symptoms recur. The story of the subsequent deterioration of their relationship is heartbreaking and, like so much else in this remarkable book, haunting. In flashbacks and flash forwards, Hewitt also writes insightfully and movingly about his coming of age as a gay man who often seems to display a deep-seated, internalized homophobia; he longs to be normal. Happily, his book is anything but normal; it is extraordinary and simply unforgettable. Bravo!
YA: The coming-of-age themes and lyrical prose will appeal to older, literary teens. MC.--Michael Cart
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
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Cart, Michael. "All Down Darkness Wide." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 18, 15 May 2022, pp. 2+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A704942877/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d887a9c3. Accessed 22 Aug. 2025.
All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir
by Sean Hewitt
Cape, [pounds sterling]14.99, pp. 240
Sean Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. 'A kind, large woman' who was babysitting him told him that it was wrong. 'I was perhaps only six or seven at the time, but she knew. I knew it too. It was as if she had peered into the deep, secret part of my soul and seen what I was hiding.'
Alongside the precocious knowledge came desperate attempts to conceal the truth. Hewitt adopted alien ways of being: 'I regulated myself; I policed myself.' As an adolescent, he spread rumours about his exploits with girls. He even watched heterosexual porn on the sitting room television in the hope that his classmates would spot him from the street. By the time he went to university his armour was so deeply embedded that it was indistinguishable from his skin.
All Down Darkness Wide is his account of his quest for an authentic life. It is poignant and painful, rigorous and sensual, focussing on the four people who helped him on his journey to selfhood. Two are lovers: Jack, a PhD student, whom he first visits for a troilist tryst in Cambridge; and Elias, a Swedish backpacker, whom he meets in Colombia. Two are poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Karin Boye.
None of these guides and guardians lived untroubled lives. Both Hopkins and Boye died in their early forties. Hopkins, unable to express his love for men, was wracked with guilt about his desires and the particular sacrilege of eroticising 'the muscular body of Christ on the crucifix'. Boye's romantic life was convoluted. Her suicide was followed within days by that of her longterm partner Margot. Then, weeks later, Anita, the woman for whom she'd left Margot, succumbed to cancer. Likewise, Jack died in his mid-twenties and Elias suffered from clinical depression. Nevertheless, out of all this pain, Hewitt has forged a life-enhancing memoir.
Its main focus is Elias, who at first seems to be Hewitt's romantic ideal, his spontaneity and athleticism being everything that he himself lacks. When Elias returns his affection, Hewitt feels 'as though I had pulled some figment of a dream back into real life with me'. He moves to Elias's home town of Gothenburg, where the dream soon turns sour. Elias becomes increasingly withdrawn, and on his 27th birthday attempts suicide. He is saved, and for the next three years Hewitt's life is both devoted to his care and dominated by the fear that he will try again, this time successfully.
Hewitt is unsparing in his depiction of the maelstrom of emotions experienced in looking after someone with depression: someone who 'was both the man I loved and the person who wanted to kill the man I loved'. He acknowledges the selfish element in his need for Elias to be cured: 'The two of us were so intertwined, our lives by this point so intimately connected, that I couldn't survive the losing of him.' When they ultimately split up, he plunges into a cycle of fleeting, anonymous encounters, until, recognising their futility, he loses 'the desire for what is dangerous' and discovers a new strength within himself.
Hewitt goes on to have a successful career as a poet and academic. He gives no hint of what became of Elias, which, while it may be for reasons of discretion, is frustrating to the reader who has invested so much in his story. That apart, this book stands alongside Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast as an outstanding chronicle of a gay poet's journey of self-discovery.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Arditti, Michael. "Journey to selfhood." Spectator, vol. 349, no. 10119, 6 Aug. 2022, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A713670500/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a073dec1. Accessed 22 Aug. 2025.
Open, Heaven
Sean Hewitt. Knopf $28 (224p)
ISBN 978-0-593-80284-7
THE SUPERB FIRST NOVEL from British and Irish poet Hewitt (after the collection Raptures Road) is a wistful account of a gay teen's unrequited first love. In 2002, sensitive James is attracted to Luke, a troubled young man temporarily staying with his aunt and uncle in rural Thornmere, England ("He must need someone, and didn't I need someone, too?" James wonders). His desire for Luke is as strong as his fear of rejection, and he cherishes the time they spend together, exploring a nearby cave, drinking brandy from Luke's flask, and going to a school disco party, where Luke attracts attention from several girls. Luke's cocky and confident demeanor rubs off on James, prompting him to give Luke a porn magazine, and he's thrilled to watch Luke gaze at the pictures of naked women ("I knew that the imagination was more pliable, more open to change, than real life"). But after James sees Luke with one of the girls from the party, he's filled with a "cold panic" at his failure to keep Luke to himself. James potently expresses the charge he feels around Luke ("Being with him was the one point in my life when I remembered feeling electrically alive"), and Hewitt manages to convey both the allure and the peril of that spark ("I wanted to be lost in him," James thinks, "and the hope was a torture to me"). Anchored by a grounded sense of place and the universal theme of adolescent longing, Hewitt's narrative strikes a resonant chord. It's a stunner. Agent: Adam Eaglin, Cheney Agency. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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"Open, Heaven." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 3, 20 Jan. 2025, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300052/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6a020a8a. Accessed 22 Aug. 2025.
In Sean Hewitt's novel, ''Open, Heaven,'' two isolated boys develop an intense, undefined relationship.
OPEN, HEAVEN, by Sean Hewitt
''Open, Heaven,'' the first novel by the poet and memoirist Sean Hewitt, begins with an epigraph from William Blake's poem ''Milton'': ''every Flower/The Pink, the Jessamine, the Wall-flower, the Carnation,/The Jonquil, the mild Lily opes her heavens; every Tree/And Flower & Herb soon fill the air with an innumerable Dance,/Yet all in order sweet & lovely, Men are sick with Love.'' It's a fitting start. This is a novel that has, line for line, more descriptions of flowers than any I can remember reading, and that has as its all-consuming preoccupation the delusion and disorder that abject desire can cause.
Most of the novel takes place around 2002, when the narrator, James, is 16. He lives with his family in Thornmere, a village in northern England that seems either quaintly charming or suffocatingly bleak, depending on one's sensibility and affinity for cows. James feels like an ''interloper'' there. He's gay and has recently come out. His parents are somewhat supportive, in their mild, perplexed way, though around town the news has been met with chilly silence or disgust.
Then James meets Luke, a 17-year-old who arrives to live with his aunt and uncle for a year. His origins are murky -- a mother somewhere in France, a father in prison. He becomes James's obsession, a blank canvas onto which James can project his unfulfilled desires. Luke is charismatic and cocksure, casually fluent in the arcane codes governing the lives of straight teenage boys. His sexuality remains maddeningly ambiguous, even as he and James become best friends. James slowly falls in love with Luke, and he grows increasingly desperate to know if his feelings are reciprocated. He fears his desire is a betrayal: ''I was hardly a friend to him at all, only an opportunist, trying to get close to him so I could convince him to love me.''
The inchoate pain of asymmetrical love, the twin currents of need and shame that flow beneath the surface of desire -- these are familiar topics for Hewitt, whose 2022 memoir, ''All Down Darkness Wide,'' was widely praised as a wrenching portrait of a doomed relationship. But where the memoir was piercing and profound, ''Open, Heaven'' clings insistently to the superficial. Hewitt has a fondness for lyrical description, particularly of the natural world (''the flowers from afar looked like a pure white froth ... a bright sky-blue blanket of forget-me-nots was ruched in the dappled light...''). These passages effectively stir up an aura of misty poignancy, but they are deployed with such frequency and at such cloying length that at times it seems like Hewitt's goal is merely to conjure an exquisite atmosphere, rather than to understand these characters or to imbue their story with any emotional weight.
While the novel is full of beautiful surfaces, it never gives these boys any sense of particularity; we don't know what draws them to each other. This is the problem with unrelenting rapture: It can become generic and impersonal, even solipsistic. ''It was like walking through a folk song that afternoon,'' Hewitt writes, ''the blackbirds and the thrushes, the sweetness of the flowers, the boy I loved, and who might even love me, waiting for me between the trees.''
This is sentimental without communicating actual sentiment, airy without ever taking flight. James is enthralled by his fantasy of Luke's hidden depths -- ''beneath the blush of his cheeks, I imagined an ocean of thought'' -- but we get no notion of what those depths might contain, nor even what James might think they contain. ''When [Luke] was alone, inside himself, he was pure, golden,'' James concludes. ''He was like a statue of beauty to me, considered and perfectly made.'' A statue may be enough to satisfy adolescent curiosity. But it's not enough for a novel.
OPEN, HEAVEN | By Sean Hewitt | Knopf | 207 pp. | $28
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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
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Lee, Charlie. "Crush." The New York Times Book Review, 25 May 2025, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A841230048/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e6521519. Accessed 22 Aug. 2025.
Hewitt, Seán OPEN, HEAVEN Knopf (Fiction None) $28.00 4, 15 ISBN: 9780593802847
Twenty years later, an Irish man revisits his hometown, and his first love.
In the prologue of Irish poet Hewitt's debut novel, set in 2022, narrator James Legh has an insight: "Every time I looked into a lover's eyes--even, I think, my husband's eyes--I wanted to see Luke's eyes, green and urgent, holding me." He decides to return to Thornmere, where he grew up and where, at the age of 16, he fell in love with a boy who was staying on a farm that was one of the stops on the early morning milk run, his first job. James is a deeply awkward and lonely boy, and coming out to his parents and classmates has only isolated him further. In addition to economic struggles, his parents have another hardship: James's 5-year-old brother, Eddie--an adorable character, perfectly depicted--has a serious chronic illness that causes frequent, terrifying seizures. Over the next few months, James' adolescent crush on Luke will completely consume him, leading to sublime tortures and tortuous sublimes and, finally, a critical crossroads of loyalty. Or, as James puts it, "I had come to find love, its vision, its company, to be changed by it, set free into its passionate balance, knowing that it would deplete me as much as it sustained, that it would torture me as much as it made life, the thing it threw into agony, worth living." This is a poet's novel, with as much nature writing as action and dialogue; Wordsworth meets Justin Torres in its aching intensity and passionate descriptions. Here is James regarding Luke as he thumbs through a porn mag: "I watched him, trying to trace any flicker of emotion or intent across his face, and all the green and golden light of the trees was washing over him, the leaves a lush blur behind him. Occasionally, a breeze would life and sway a branch, and make a lovely sighing sound, and then came the crinkling noise of a page being turned." Readers looking for gorgeous language and richly developed atmosphere will be impressed and moved.
A queer coming-of-age novel that achieves rare peaks of lyricism and emotional intensity.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hewitt, Sean: OPEN, HEAVEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785074/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=655544f0. Accessed 22 Aug. 2025.