Sarah Howe

Sarah Howe (born 1983) is a British Chinese poet, editor and researcher in English literature. Her first full poetry collection, Loop of Jade, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of The Year Award. It is the first time that the T. S. Eliot Prize has been given to a debut collection.

Biography Howe was born in 1983 in Hong Kong. Her father is English; her mother was born in China, but left the country in 1949 for Hong Kong. The family moved to the UK in 1991, when Howe was aged seven. Her first degree was in English at Christ's College, Cambridge, matriculating in 2001. She subsequently gained a PhD at that college; her thesis is entitled "Literature and the Visual Imagination in Renaissance England, 1580–1620".

She spent five years as a research fellow at the Faculty of English and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, until 2015. Her research there was in the area of 16th- and 17th-century English literature; her interests included relationships between poetry and visual art forms, including sculpture and architecture.

In 2015–16, she was the Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study of Harvard University, where she focused on writing poetry. She is one of the judges of the 2015 National Poetry Competition of The Poetry Society.

Poetry Howe's first poetry chapbook or pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, was published by Tall Lighthouse in 2009. It won a 2010 Eric Gregory Trust Fund Award for poets under 30. Howe was selected for The Complete Works mentoring programme in 2012.

Her first collection, Loop of Jade, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2015. The main sequence of poems is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges's fictional encyclopedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.

Loop of Jade won the 2015 T. S. Eliot Prize – the first time this award has been given to a debut collection It was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. T. S. Eliot Prize chair Pascale Petit described it as "absolutely amazing" and predicted that Howe's creative use of form would "change British poetry."

Howe's poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including three editions of The Best British Poetry (Salt), Dear World & Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe; 2013) and Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe; 2014). Her sonnet "Relativity", commissioned for the 2015 National Poetry Day, was recorded by physicist Stephen Hawking, also a fellow of Gonville and Caius College. His book A Brief History of Time had inspired Howe as a teenager.

In June 2018 Howe was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.

In 2025, Howe's collection Foretokens was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

List of major works Foretokens (2025) Loop of Jade (2015)