Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her poetry is precisely painted and aesthetically striking, often grappling with, and delighting in, problems of cultural identity and representation. Like Kei Miller’s explorations of hybridity and cross-cultural identities, Howe’s poetry is inventive, erudite and highly playful, engaging the reader with its passion for language’s intrigues and inadequacies. Howe’s first book Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2015.
Sarah Howe studied for her BA, MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge, also spending a year as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. In her academic work, she has a particular interest in visual qualities in Renaissance literature and in the psychology of visual perception. Until 2015 she was a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she taught Renaissance literature.
Books in order of publication:
Loop of Jade – 2015
Foretokens – 2025
Oak Lawn Library Friends 