In May 2022, author and poet Seán Hewitt was getting a haircut when an email came through to say that the literary agent Jonathan Williams wanted to speak with him. Williams was not Hewitt’s own agent, and he didn’t know why he would want to get in touch.
“I was writing reviews in The Irish Times at the time, and I was going through my head thinking what bad review have you written about someone, and he’s really angry with you? My heart kind of dropped.”
When the haircut was finished, Hewitt dialled the phone number provided.
“Congratulations!,” came the voice down the line.
Far from reprimanding him, Williams wished to inform Hewitt that he had just won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, a €10,000 award that celebrates an outstanding body of work by an emerging Irish writer under 40.
“I was so discombobulated, because I was ready to be told off, and have this argument, and I was completely caught by surprise,” Hewitt says. “It took a while for it to sink in.”
At the time, Hewitt had published a poetry collection, Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape, 2020), a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (Jonathan Cape, 2022), and an academic work, JM Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2021). He has since gone on to co-edit an anthology on queer love from the ancient world, 300,000 Kisses (Particular Books, 2023), publish another collection of poetry, Rapture’s Road (Jonathan Cape, 2024), and is now preparing for the release of his debut novel, the unsurprisingly accomplished Open, Heaven (Jonathan Cape).
We meet in a Dublin city centre hotel in the run-up to publication. Hewitt’s hair is neatly coiffed: short at the sides, with pepper-grey curls on top. He’s dressed in an all-black ensemble (black T-shirt, black jeans, black denim jacket), in his left ear is a hoop earring, and around his neck is a chain with a ring looped through. This is a man for whom aesthetics matter, a topic we will come to later in our conversation. But first the novel.
Open, Heaven is a queer coming-of-age story set in a small British town, across four seasons beginning in autumn 2002. As he grapples with his own sense of self, James begins to form a complex relationship with Luke, an outsider who has come to live in the town.
“The starting point was a question of what being in love does to our imagination,” says Hewitt. “How it makes you fantasise and make up fictional ideas that may or may not accord with reality. I wanted a main character who was trying to decode whether someone else loved him back.”
[ Capturing the ancients’ dazzling queer energy in image and storyOpens in new window ]
Growing up queer in a world that seems to have no place for him, James’s internal world – his conjured reality – becomes a sort of refuge.
“I have a theory that [the reason] there’s so many queer people in theatre and the arts might have something to do with the need for a dream world in adolescence,” Hewitt says. “The world around them is not a place that is accommodating them, and so they end up with a very well-trained imaginative world.”
In its most basic form, Open, Heaven is a romance novel, about the imprint of first love and the agony when it is unrequited. But it also layers the many forms of love atop one another: familial, platonic, romantic.
“In some ways, it’s a book about heartbreak. In some ways, I think it’s a book about misunderstanding that love is much more expansive than we might give it credit for,” Hewitt says. “Sometimes the world that we want is not the world we’re in. But sometimes the world we’re in is better than the one we want, but it takes a long time to realise that.”
I have a kind of unfashionable attraction to beauty, which is not really a thing we talk about much in art. I think the whole concept of it has been dismissed as old-fashioned
There is something ancient to Hewitt’s writing style. It is clear and without affect, yet full of careful illuminating descriptions. Feelings of love, desire, yearning, fear are mirrored and heightened by an intensely vivid natural world. A “choir of gnats” floats over water in the evening sun “like sparks of a fire that the water could not touch or extinguish”. Dew gets “its eyes” into a tent, “hundreds of them glint[ing] over the canvas, watching”.
Hewitt confesses that it surprises him how often people reference the natural world when speaking about the book.
“I’m obsessed with writing about it. [But] without being a contrarian, it’s so much of the world. So, it always strikes me as strange that it’s such a noticeable thing to write about. Because to my mind, it’s 95 per cent of everything that exists on the planet.”
Still, there is a pastoral, bucolic aspect to the novel that feels closer to the Romantics than to contemporary literature.
“Yeah. I mean, when I pitched the idea for this novel, I think I said something like: Thomas Hardy meets Edmund White. I wanted the messiness of a queer coming-of-age novel, but I wanted a pastoral novel, too. […] I think so often we associate a move to the city as being a move towards life, towards acceptance, or community, or intelligence and education. And I just wondered why the queer novel and the pastoral novel couldn’t go together.”
Hewitt drafted the book over the course of a year, writing each section in the season to which it corresponded (in autumn, he wrote the autumn section, and so on). When he got stuck, he would go outside and take photos, or walk. He was trying to imbibe something of the “particularity of the season”. But also, he simply liked being outdoors in nature.
“I think there are all these literary reasons why nature might be important in the book. But I think also behind that, I have a kind of unfashionable attraction to beauty, which is not really a thing we talk about much in art. I think the whole concept of it has been dismissed as old-fashioned.”
Nevertheless, he feels people react to beauty.
“I was sitting in the garden this morning watching the birds, and I think even animals react to beauty. Everything has an aesthetic sense […] I think people dismiss the romantic as naive, or the beautiful as a lie, hiding something. And exposure, and cleverness, and pulling things apart, and ugliness are all very fashionable. Sparse sentences. Plainness. All of these things, I see held up as positive values. And I want to make a small case for lushness and decorated sentences; bringing musical sentences, and beautiful things to the centre of the novel again.”
Born in 1990 to an English father and Irish mother, Hewitt grew up in Warrington in the north of England. His mother was a primary schoolteacher, his father a joiner, and while there were books in the house, they weren’t a central focus. Hewitt was the only one of the three boys in the family who “fell into reading”.
He also kept what he now thinks of as a “commonplace book”, where he would copy down passages from books, poems, song lyrics. As a youngster, he wrote ghost stories, and as a teen, there was some “embarrassing poetry”, but it wasn’t until he went to Cambridge to study English that he began to take writing more seriously.
English and Irish ... I always think if I choose one, I’m kind of either ignoring my mum or ignoring my dad. So, I try to choose to say both
“There was a poetry group that met on Wednesday nights and everyone had to bring a poem to be discussed, which meant that I had to write a poem a week. It was very good to have that homework and structure, because it made me practise.”
After graduating, he enrolled in a master’s, followed by a PhD, both in Liverpool.
“As much as I enjoyed the study and the research, I was buying myself time to write. I knew if I got a ‘real job’ I wouldn’t have the time to write, so I was always trying to carve out a space to do that.”
For a time, he lived in Sweden (his memoir recounts, with haunting beauty, a relationship he had during this period, and the strain of loving someone who is mentally ill), but for the past eight years, he has lived in Dublin, where he works as assistant professor in literary practice at Trinity College.
Asked about his relationship to Irishness, he says: “People always want you to choose one or the other, especially with two identities that can often be put into contention with each other: English and Irish. But I always think if I choose one, I’m kind of either ignoring my mum or ignoring my dad. So, I try to choose to say both.”
His debut poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, was published in 2020, a bittersweet time, as he had just lost his father to cancer. Later, when it came to publicising his memoir, he found the toll of speaking about difficult subject matter quite gruelling. By contrast, publishing a novel feels liberating.
“It’s the first thing I’ve written where I didn’t have any personal high-stakes subject matter in it,” he says. “It was a relief that I wouldn’t have to always live a certain life in order to have material. Because that was my worry. When you’re writing from your own life and you get to a point where the life you’re writing about has caught up with the books, [you say] okay, well, what next? What more suffering is there to come so I can write another book?”
But as he wrote Open, Heaven, suffering was far from his mind. His writing process is something he tries not to be overly strict or prescriptive about, he says.
“Writing is the thing I enjoy doing most. It’s all I want to do. You often hear writers say: I don’t let myself have lunch until I’ve written 2,000 words, and I get up at five in the morning and [so on]. I don’t punish myself into writing. If I sit down one day to write and I only get 150 words but I’m happy enough with them, that’s fine.”
What he wants from his work is “to be open to the reader”.
“What I mean by that is I’m not an ironic writer, or a sarcastic writer, or a writer who’s interested in showing off cleverness in front of the reader. I want to meet them at a place of equality and openness.”
Open, Heaven by Sean Hewitt is published by Jonathan Cape
