Launched in April 2024, the PEN Heaney Prize recognises outstanding poetry with a focus on social engagement.
The inaugural PEN/Heaney Prize ceremony was held in the Great Hall, Queen’s University Belfast, in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s on 2nd December. The award, presented by Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann, English PEN and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, recognises a single volume of poetry of outstanding literary merit which engages with cultural or political events and examines their effect on human conditions or relationships. Susannah Dickey’s ISDAL (Picador Poetry) is the winner in 2024.
Judges for this 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.”
Accepting the awatd, Susannah Dickey said: “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.”
Shortlisted volumes:
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.
