Sarah Howe Workshop - In Place of Memory

Join Sarah Howe for a workshop about memory and its complications. If memory’s entanglements and evasions make it a shaky basis for knowledge, where does that leave our sense of our selves? Opening up our writing to memory’s inevitable distortions can be destabilising at first, but also freeing: whether as individuals, families or nations, how might writing poems help us to understand our pasts? In our efforts to process past experience, where does truth meet belief? By reading some contemporary poets who make a study in their work of the mechanisms of remembering and revelation, along with some easy exercises, we’ll generate some early drafts and reach towards fresh ways of making poems. 

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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 pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, won an Eric Gregory Award, and her first collection, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2014, she co-founded Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool. Her most recent collection is Foretokens (Chatto, 2025)