Dr Seán Hewitt, FRSL

Seán Hewitt, FRSL, is a poet, novelist, memoirist and critic. His first collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape, 2020), was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and won The Laurel Prize in 2021. His second collection of poems, Rapture’s Road (Jonathan Cape, 2024), was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. 

 All Down Darkness Wide (Jonathan Cape, 2022), a memoir, won The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022, and 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World, a collaboration with the artist Luke Edward Hall, was published by Penguin, in 2023. His debut novel is Open, Heaven (2025). Seán’s work has been translated into more than ten languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Seán also has an ongoing interest in the literature of the Irish Revival, ecopoetics, and literature and science. His monograph J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021, and he has written on figures such as W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Roger Casement, and Emily Lawless.

Seán teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate levels, on the MPhil Creative Writing, and supervises candidates for the PhD in Literary Practice.

Selected Publications

Books

• Open, Heaven. Novel. Jonathan Cape (2025), Knopf (USA and Canada, 2025), Einaudi (Italy, 2025), Suhrkamp (Germany, 2025), Robert Laffont (France, 2025), De Arbeiderspers (Netherlands, 2025), Solumbokvennen (Norway, 2025), Gyldendal (Denmark, 2025), Urano (Spain, 2025), Stereoma (Greece, 2025)
  
  
• Rapture’s Road. Poetry. Jonathan Cape (2024), Knopf (USA, 2026)
  
  
• Three Hundred Thousand Kisses: Queer Love in the Ancient World, illustrated by Luke Edward Hall. Translation / Anthology. Penguin: Particular Books (2023), Clarkson Potter (USA, 2023), L’Ippocampo (Italy, 2024), HarperCollins Brazil (Brazil, 2024), Eulyoo (South Korea, 2025), Editions Ducasse (France, 2025)
  
  
• All Down Darkness Wide. Memoir. Jonathan Cape (2022), Penguin Press (USA, 2022), Solum Bokvennen (Norway, 2022), De Arbeiderspers (Netherlands, 2023), Literarna Basta (Czechia, 2024), Urano (Spain, 2026)
  
  
• J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism. Critical study. Oxford University Press (2021)
  
  
• Buile Suibhne. Poems. with illustrations by Amy Jeffs. Fine Press Poetry (2021)
  
  
• Tongues of Fire. Poems. Jonathan Cape (2020), Knopf (USA, 2026)
  
  

Selected Peer-Reviewed Articles

• ‘Emily Lawless, Natural History, and the Possibilities of Enchantment’, Irish University Review, (Nov 2024)
  
  
• ‘Comedy, Misrule and the Irish Revival’, Forum for Modern Language Studies. Vol. 58, No. 3 (2022)
  
  
• ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Skies of Couple-Colour”’, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 58, No. 4 (2020)
  
  
• ‘Yeats’s Re-Enchanted Nature’, International Yeats Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2018)
  
  
• ‘Dialectics, Irony, and J.M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints’, Review of English Studies, Vol. 68, No. 286 (2017)
  
  
• ‘“A Black Knot”: Temporalities, Modernisation, and the One-Act Plays of J.M. Synge’, English Studies, Vol. 97, No. 8 (2016)
  
  
• ‘“An Initiated Mystic”: Modernization and Occultism in Synge’s The Aran Islands’, New Hibernia Review, Vol. 19, No. 4 (2015)

Further Publications

• RSS Page: https://peoplefinder.tcd.ie/Profile?Username=SHEWITT