”A poem has a moment.”
We spoke with award-winning writer Seán Hewitt about his fascination with poetry and how books are ventures into the landscapes of memory.
”Poems are often ways in which we try to hold or pause time. And I think in that way, they have this relationship to elegy. They’re almost like the impulse to take a photograph.”
”When I wrote A Memoir, it involved a sort of research into this archive, which is yourself. You have to study your own memory. It’s quite a strange thing to do. But you sit there at a desk, or you walk around, and suddenly you remember one thing that someone said to you when you were 15 years old. And it sets off a train of memory. And memory, I think, is not ever-present in our minds.
It has keys and doors. And we find the key to one memory, and it unlocks another memory, and it unlocks another.”
Seán Hewitt (b. 1990 in Warrington, England) is a poet, novelist, memoirist, and critic. He studied English at Girton College, Cambridge. His first collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, 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, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.
All Down Darkness Wide: 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 a dozen languages.
Hewitt 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. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Seán Hewitt was interviewed by Elisabeth Skou Pedersen in Snekkersten, Denmark. The conversation took place during the Louisiana Literature festival in August 2025.
Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard
Edit: Nanna Dahm
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026
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