Seán Hewitt – författare

A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Justin Torres in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakeningSet in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives.James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his reach: autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him "like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre," drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.

When James meets Luke, everything changes – an exhilarating tale of hidden desire and sudden freedom in the wild countryside.THE INSTANT TOP 10 IRISH BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2026‘An achingly beautiful story of first love’ GUARDIAN‘Superb… Transcendent’ SARAH PERRY‘Beautifully written, deeply felt’ MICHAEL MAGEE‘Heart-rending… Propulsive’ FINANCIAL TIMESJames dreams of another life far away from his small village. Almost an adult, his newfound desires threaten to unravel his shy exterior. Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to stay with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm.With the passing seasons, a bond emerges between them that transforms their lives. Yet James is never sure of Luke’s true feelings and as the end of summer nears, he has a choice to make: will he risk everything for the possibility of love?*A Book of the Year for the Guardian, Observer, Irish Times and BBC*READERS LOVE OPEN, HEAVEN‘My favourite book of the year’‘Gorgeous. I was completely transported’‘The intoxicating rush of first love. Five stars!’‘Breathtakingly beautiful. A story that stays with you’‘Heart-breaking but also triumphant. A must-read’‘The most truthful novel about lovethat I have read in a long time’‘It made my heart hurt in the best ways’ HELEN MACDONALD‘Hewitt writes with such tenderness and grace’ ANNE ENRIGHT‘Desire, yearning, fear… Intensely vivid’ IRISH TIMES‘Gorgeous… Piercing, intimate and euphoric’ COLIN WALSH‘Seán Hewitt is the real deal’ BENJAMIN MYERSOpen, Heaven was an Irish top ten bestseller w/c 28 April 2025

This book is a complete re-assessment of the works of J.M. Synge, one of Ireland's major playwrights. The book offers the first complete consideration of all of Synge's major plays and prose works in nearly 30 years, drawing on extensive archival research to offer innovative new readings. Much work has been done in recent years to uncover Synge's modernity and to emphasise his political consciousness. This book builds on this re-assessment, undertaking a full systematic exploration of Synge's published and unpublished works. Tracing his journey from an early Romanticism through to the more combative modernism of his later work, the book's innovative methodology treats text as process, and considers Synge's reading materials, his drafts, letters, diaries, and journalism, turning up exciting and unexpected revelations. Thus, Synge's engagement with occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, and even a late reaction against eugenic nationalisms, are all brought into the critical discussion. Breaking new ground in ascertaining the tenets of Synge's spirituality, and his aesthetic and political idealization of harmony with nature, the book also builds on new work in modernist studies, arguing that Synge can be understood as a leftist modernist, exhibiting many of the key concerns of early modernism, but routing them through a socialist politics. Thus, this book is valuable not only to considerations of Synge and the Irish Revival, but also to modernist studies more broadly.

Steeped in honey, Juventius, your golden eyes, and as sweet too when I press my lips to them - three hundred thousand kisses is not close to enoughFor centuries, evidence of queer love in the ancient world was ignored or suppressed. Even today, only a few, famous narratives are widely known - yet there's a rich literary tradition of Greek and Roman love that extends far beyond this handful of stories. Here, the poet Seán Hewitt and painter Luke Edward Hall collect together, for the first time, forty of the most exhilarating queer tales in the classical canon and bring them newly to life. A ground-breaking anthology that changes the way we see the ancient world - and invites us to reflect on the puritanism of our own - 300,000 Kisses is a riotous celebration of desire in all its forms.

A luminous memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a tender exploration of queer identity.'Beautiful' Colm Tóibín'Rapturous' New York Times'Extraordinary' Observer'Stunning' Sunday TimesWhen Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face to face with crisis.Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope.All Down Darkness Wide is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a fearless exploration of a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds.WINNER OF THE ROONEY PRIZE FOR IRISH LITERATURE 2022'Extraordinarily beautiful... the best new work of non-fiction I've read in years' Sarah Perry'Rigorous and sensual... Hewitt has forged a life-enhancing memoir' Spectator

** WINNER OF THE LAUREL PRIZE 2021 ****A SPECTATOR AND IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020****SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES / UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020****SHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN POLLARD FOUNDATION INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE 2021****SHORTLISTED FOR THE DALKEY LITERARY EMERGING WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021**A remarkable first collection by an important new poetIn this collection, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual. Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent. In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet's father: in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. 'This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.'Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE *In this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland'Points to a bright future for Irish poetry' SUNDAY TIMES'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet' MAX PORTER'Amazing writing of breathtaking power' IRVINE WELSHAs the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters.Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature.A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture’s Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.

When James meets Luke, everything changes – an exhilarating tale of hidden desire and sudden freedom in the wild countryside.THE INSTANT TOP 10 IRISH BESTSELLERDYLAN THOMAS PRIZE LONGLIST 2026‘An achingly beautiful story of first love’ GUARDIAN‘Superb… Transcendent’ SARAH PERRY‘Beautifully written, deeply felt’ MICHAEL MAGEE‘Heart-rending… Propulsive’ FINANCIAL TIMESJames dreams of another life far away from his small village. Almost an adult, his newfound desires threaten to unravel his shy exterior. Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to stay with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm.With the passing seasons, a bond emerges between them that transforms their lives. Yet James is never sure of Luke’s true feelings and as the end of summer nears, he has a choice to make: will he risk everything for the possibility of love?*A Book of the Year for the Guardian, Observer, Irish Times and BBC*READERS LOVE OPEN, HEAVEN‘My favourite book of the year’‘Gorgeous. I was completely transported’‘The intoxicating rush of first love. Five stars!’‘Breathtakingly beautiful. A story that stays with you’‘Heart-breaking but also triumphant. A must-read’‘The most truthful novel about lovethat I have read in a long time’‘It made my heart hurt in the best ways’ HELEN MACDONALD‘Hewitt writes with such tenderness and grace’ ANNE ENRIGHT‘Desire, yearning, fear… Intensely vivid’ IRISH TIMES‘Gorgeous… Piercing, intimate and euphoric’ COLIN WALSH‘Seán Hewitt is the real deal’ BENJAMIN MYERSOpen, Heaven was an Irish top ten bestseller w/c 28 April 2025

Originally published in 1918 by the Talbot Press in Dublin, two years after his execution by the British Government for his involvement in the 1916 Easter Rising, Some Poems of Roger Casement has long been a collector’s item. In life and in death, Roger Casement appears to contain many contradictions: decorated British diplomat, Irish Protestant and martyred Irish nationalist. He was a humanitarian, essayist and sometime poet, a public gentleman and a private lover.Over the years, Roger Casement’s ghost has been the subject of endless controversies, co-opted into both the queer liberation movement in Ireland and the Republican movement. Predator or saviour, traitor or hero, maligned martyr or gay icon? The question depends on who you ask, and what aspects of Casement’s life they choose to hold in focus, or to dismiss as a lie. —SEÁN HEWITTIncludes a specially commissioned introduction by Seán Hewitt as well as the original 1918 introduction, written by Casement’s cousin, Gertrude Parry.

Long overlooked but now recognised as a quietly radical masterpiece, The Waking of Willie Ryan reveals John Broderick as one of the most incisive chroniclers of mid‑century Ireland. Set in a midlands town where beauty and brutality uneasily coexist, the novel follows the return of Willie Ryan – once scapegoated for his relationships with men, institutionalised, and written out of local memory – who comes home to die and, in doing so, unsettles the pieties that once destroyed him. Broderick’s portrait of Willie is unforgettably tender: a gay man whose dignity, vulnerability and refusal ‘to serve’ expose the hypocrisies of a society built on fear. Through crystalline prose and an unsparing eye, Broderick maps the forces – clerical authority, bourgeois respectability, inherited shame – that shaped Irish life in the 1960s. A pioneering exploration of queer Irish experience and a devastating critique of provincial cruelty, The Waking of Willie Ryan stands alongside the great modern Irish novels for its moral clarity, elegance, and emotional force.