Irish authors reading list

Reading lists

10 must-read books by Irish authors

Books to change your perspective on love (3)

Books that will change your perspective on love

Featured-1800×1200@2x-100-scaled (1)

Debut novels of 2025: discover the year’s breakthrough new voices

From the author of All Down Darkness Wide

Rapture's Road

A poet unafraid of the simply gorgeous&hellip; The undaunted vitality of these poems points to a bright future for Irish poetry

Stunning... Shot through with yearning and sacred imagery... Hewitt's poetry is a hide and seek of the self. It reveals and conceals

Hewitt&rsquo;s words indubitably penetrate, with Nerudian passion and force

An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet, reverential in nature and gorgeously wise in the field of human drama

Rapture's Road is that rare thing when it comes to second collections. Something which takes his debut Tongues of Fire&rsquo;s natural elements and post-modern Romantic themes and fashions them into something wholly unique. Rapture&rsquo;s Road is political without being hectoring, mystical without being detached, and wholly in hoc to a natural world in all its chaos, beauty, creativity and destruction

Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

*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 
 
As 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.

Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World

300,000 Kisses

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 enough 
 
For 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.

This lithe, rich anthology of stunning poetry and beguiling stories of queer love from the ancient world pulses with desire, lust, loss and seduction... Scintillating... An essential addition to any library

Luke Edward Hall (Author) Luke Edward Hall is an English artist, designer and columnist working across multiple disciplines. His philosophy is shaped by a love of storytelling, fantasy and romanticism. He lives in London and Gloucestershire. Seán Hewitt (Author) Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

For 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 Memoir

All Down Darkness Wide

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 Times 
 
When 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

A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon

A remarkable memoir of love and sorrow

We are witnessing the emergence of a major talent... stunning. A space will need to be made on the Queer Classics shelf

Intensely original... some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years

Exquisitely written... a fervent appeal for presence and belonging

Hewitt's book is excellent... It makes one hope this is the beginning of a wonderful trend of men writing about love with the same intense vulnerability that women have for decades now... [Hewitt] shows himself to be one of our foremost memoirists... A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon. Let us hope it is but a first volume, the beginning of a vast work.

Rapturous... even his depictions of cruising have a holy aura. As a dedicated nonfiction writer, I sometimes meet poets' memoirs with a caginess that is utterly disgraced by a book like this, whose structure is nearly as immaculate as its sentences... Writing is always an act of translation, and Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own.

[An] extraordinary memoir... All Down Darkness Wide is not about answers. It does not offer glib consolations and is all the more powerful and affecting for that.

Some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years... intensely original.

[P]oignant and painful, rigorous and sensual... Hewitt has forged a life-enhancing memoir... This book stands alongside Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast as an outstanding chronicle of a gay poet's journey of self-discovery.

A book glittering with beguiling detail... Discursive yet succinct, humane, unsparing of its author, All Down Darkness Wide will surely take its place alongside H is for Hawk as a hard-to-categorise memoir hybrid whose sales will catch fire through word-of-mouth recommendations.

Seán Hewitt's book is a beautiful, complex and textured meditation on love, on growing up gay, on becoming a poet and on inhabiting Northern landscapes in winter. His account of falling in love and being in love is honest and vivid... I was engrossed, hardly looking up as I read. I woke in the morning fully enclosed by it, as though I had been dreaming it.

Seán Hewitt's memoir is extraordinarily beautiful... moving, and humane; it is the best new work of non-fiction I've read in years.

The book in your hands is a precious, living thing, each page alive with ache and with love, with truth and with tenderness. [A] writer whose work will continue to be treasured long after our lifetimes. A wonder.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A GHOST IN THE THROAT

Gorgeous and moving prose that excavates the deep complexities of grief, shame and love with a tenderness and lightness of touch that makes the words sing.

All Down Darkness Wide is a searing and sublime account of the scars left by intolerance and how they shape a self. Hewitt's gorgeous prose gleams like a dayspring in the dimness, his story lingering long after the book is closed.

Melissa Harrison, author of ALL AMONG THE BARLEY

It's impossible not to be intensely moved by this book, written with a poet's eye for detail... His memoir of queer discovery, loves found and lost, the past that we carry with us, and ultimately of becoming, feels like a future classic.

Niven Govinden, author of DIARY OF A FILM

[A] very beautiful, very intelligent book. It is of course a moving portrait of very human fragilities, but it also testifies to the power of the heart and mind to survive all kinds of grief and emerge with much of value to say to the world.

Okechukwu Nzelu, author of HERE AGAIN NOW

A wondrous act of recollection: flickering yet sonorous, elemental, humid, full of ache, flecked with ironic comedy. Hewitt makes shimmering magic from shame and shyness... This book arrives as if it was there all along, foxed and dog-eared from the first page.

Luminous and utterly original, a book with its own darkly beautiful gravity. I can't think of anything I have read like it - in terms of style and sensibility, and emotional daring.

It's a book that lures you in with the beauty of its prose, the poetic images that linger hauntingly in the mind for long afterwards. Difficult stories of mental illness, repression, and self-denial are transfigured into something defiant and life-affirming.

Hewitt's poetic sensibility gives this exploration of empathy a lovely long, and mature cadence. He is a very wise child indeed.

Anne Enright, Irish Times, Books of the Year 2022

Raw and hypnotic... Hewitt crafts a moving story of salvation, as he charts his path out of darkness and into self-acceptance. It's an exquisite vision of queer heartbreak and liberation.

Exquisitely written... In both the rhythms of his sentences and what he relays, Hewitt places himself firmly in an established British literary tradition...Though a study of despair, the memoir is not despairing... His call, framed by the poets to whom he feels so profoundly connected, as well as by his own family, is radical, a fervent appeal for presence and belonging.

[A] remarkable book, haunting... extraordinary and simply unforgettable.

I loved Seán Hewitt's moving memoir ... an insightful account.

Stunning... This memoir is a heartbreaking disquisition on 'ghosts' like Hopkins and on the unattainability of permanence, and it features one beautiful scene after another... A profoundly moving meditation on queer identity, mental illness, and the fragility of life.

This book bears reading twice it is so beautiful. Readers seeking an elegant, profound memoir will find none better than this. Highly recommended.

An immense feat of both empathy and imagination.

This stunning memoir of life as an outsider is told with empathy, intelligence and a mastery of language... a major talent... a space will need to be made on the Queer Classics shelf.

A deeply personal account of growing up gay and lonely in Liverpool... Seán offers no resolutions or redemption, but in such achingly beautiful, resplendent writing on his darkest moments, we find hope.

A beautiful, vulnerable account... All Down Darkness Wide is a rich, moving memoir in which Hewitt reveals the loneliness of his early life, but also hope for his future yet to be written.

An exceptionally generous act of storytelling, and his readers are the richer for it.

A luminous and haunting memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a fearless exploration of queer identity and trauma. 
 
When 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.

Tongues of Fire

A remarkable first collection by an important new poet

Seán Hewitt soars... His poetry will stand the test of time, for...the sheer musicality of the language, the lightness on his metrical feet, and his keen ear for "the music of what happens" charm the reader into submission. This is an astonishingly assured debut delivered in a poetic voice that has eloquence, compassion, and serenity in equal measure...in the pantheistic tradition of Wordsworth, Whitman, John Clare, and Seamus Heaney... When it comes to nascent talent, we Irish have a tendency to mistake the fifth or sixth month of pregnancy for the ninth, thrusting premature greatness upon the liveliest embryos. By contrast, Hewitt seems to have sprung fully formed into the literary world and, on this showing, nothing seems beyond him.

It is extraordinary to encounter a debut collection that feels as established as Seán Hewitt’s… These unmediated poems are, at the same time, charged: they pull you in swiftly, you become immersed… In ‘Tongues of Fire’, the title piece and last in the collection, the present is burning. It is an exceptionally moving poem – impossible to read without a lump in the throat… He grafts the people and circumstances of his life on to nature with unerring brilliance… This is, above all, a devotional collection and will lift the spirits of all who read it…. He has a gift for gravity, rootedness, calm… Hewitt has the confidence to relax and to allow his poems, in an unaffected and sometimes conversational way, to speak to the heart.

I fell into [Tongues of Fire] one morning and read the whole book through and it truly warmed my soul. He's an exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet, reverential in nature and gorgeously wise in the field of human drama. It's a stunning collection of poems.

This is an extraordinary collection - heart-bruising, tender - one to cherish, and live by. Though Hewitt moves us through anguish and destruction, love still glows; and in the dark undoings of these poems, decay lights the wildwood with its strange, ethereal foxfire. As Hewitt writes, "it is hard to tell where heaven starts"; I find it in these poems, which are beyond-gorgeous, beyond-glorious, blood-felt, feral, luminous.

Seán Hewitt understands that poetic form is sacred and mysterious. In these godforsaken times his reverent procedures are food for the soul.

I fell in love with these wild, heartsore, ecstatic poems. They lead us to deep, hushed places - in the woods and heaths, in our hearts and bodies - and unearth such tenderness and dark treasure. Tongues of Fire is a beautiful book and Seán Hewitt is an extraordinary writer.

In Tongues of Fire, Hewitt crafts poems of intense beauty and endless range, which glisten with queer desire... Considered and poised, every line in this stunning compilation surprises and nurtures.

** 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 poet 
 
In 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.

Seán Hewitt

An exquisite tale of first love . . . Hewitt is superb in his loving and acute descriptions of the natural world

Heart-rending . . . sensuous and decadent

A beautiful novel about how a first love can shape a whole life

A mature and complete debut novel… Hewitt’s poetic facility makes easy music of his atmosphere. The central relationship occurs by light, sensitive touch, and reaches arresting emotional depths

Hewitt writes with such tenderness and grace; in Open, Heaven, beauty, longing and the natural world form a single chord that strikes the heart of the reader with love’s impossibility. The heightened, poetic state of adolescence is perfectly captured here

ANNE ENRIGHT, Booker Prize-winning author of The Wren, The Wren

Open, Heaven blisses with the bright verdure of youth – blackbirds and blossoming hedges, wet hands held tight under buttery starlight. But Open, Heaven also courses with youth’s great agony, the cruelty that learning to love should be inexorably followed by learning to grieve its undoing. Hewitt's is a searching novel orbiting pleasure, loss, and the ecstatic release of both; which is to say it’s a novel about time. Which is to say it’s a novel about us

KAVEH AKBAR, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!

Beautifully written, deeply felt, Open, Heaven does what the very best coming of age stories do: it takes us back to those moments we often dismiss in our own lives, when we felt so deeply, so intensely, and so purely that the world seemed to stop

A searchingly poignant and beautiful novel about how a first love can shape a whole life, Open, Heaven is a deeply felt, lyrical and impossibly tender read. Hewitt exquisitely conjures the passage of time and all the complexities of growing up queer, perfectly captures the way places and events become stitched into memory, and elucidates with rare power how transfixing, incandescent, and transfiguring a first love can be. It made my heart hurt in the best ways

I loved it . . . Open, Heaven is a beautiful, lyrical and tender novel of youthful passion and the longing for connection. Hewitt’s debut is one to savour

FERDIA LENNON, author of Glorious Exploits

Heart-rending…sensuous and decadent… Hewitt’s wistful, reverie-like writing captures the painful queer experience of confusing friendship for romantic love

A tender, eloquent debut novel: in adulthood a man returns (in place and memory) to the village in northern England where, as a teen, he met Luke, his first love

A novel very much about longing in a small village… James’s loneliness shifts and changes and takes on new hues. Incredibly atmospheric. Very God’s Own Country meets Heartstopper. I think people will love it

BRANDON TAYLOR, author of Real Life and The Late Americans

Piercing and intimate, euphoric and elegiac – Open, Heaven is a gorgeous ache of a novel, an exquisitely told story whose characters linger long after you’ve closed the covers.

A story about the agony and ecstasy of first love

BBC, ‘The most exciting books to read in 2025’

A gorgeous debut; perfectly encapsulates the dirt and muck of urgent adolescent desire – a novel that thrums with hidden love and concealed truths, it takes the hand of the reader and walks with them through the isolated village of the young queer self

ANDREW McMILLAN, author of Pity and Physical

A novel built on watching, lingering, hoping, it’s rich and intense…with lush descriptions of the rural setting… A tale of thwarted yearning

Open, Heaven is a striking debut novel from a richly gifted poet and memoirist: an intensely conjured portrayal of the hopeless, all-consuming love of one lonely teenager for another and how it marks him for life. As in Hewitt’s poetry, the beauties of nature erupt throughout, seeming to express the things the two boys cannot voice and the cumulative effect is as bittersweet and elegiac as birdsong

PATRICK GALE, author of Notes from an Exhibition

Superb… Anchored by a grounded sense of place and the universal theme of adolescent longing, Hewitt’s narrative strikes a resonant chord. It’s a stunner

A page-turning tale of a first love, Open, Heaven is so tenderly written, so exquisitely crafted. The writing halts time and gives us a visceral sense of this life-changing experience. A wonderful debut

MONIQUE ROFFEY, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch

I’ve so much to say about this book but I keep coming back to the term ‘pure-hearted’. It’s full of wisdom... It’s so moving, without an ounce of sentimentality. It’s simple and serious but it also manages to be genuinely suspenseful as well. Beautiful

AIDAN COTTRELL-BOYCE, author of The End of Nightwork

Open, Heaven beautifully conveys the pain and possibility of first love. Written with generosity, this is a coming-of-age story whose protagonist never turns his gaze from the friend he desires, nor from the man he longs to become

CAOILINN HUGHES, author of The Wild Laughter

Tender, timeless, troubled and true, Seán Hewitt’s desirous debut sees him as something of a modern successor to the heady and heartfelt writings of DH Lawrence or EM Forster. In other words: the real deal

BENJAMIN MYERS, author of The Gallows Pole

Here is love with all its aches and calibrations, a tender, moving novel which gently embraces the reader. As the summer of love proves to be the briefest of seasons Hewitt quietly hymns the countryside too, charting its rhythms and leafy changes, as the poet in him shines insistently through

Accomplished… Feelings of love, desire, yearning, fear are mirrored and heightened by an intensely vivid natural world

[A] stunning debut novel… It is an exploration of vulnerability, desire, and the bittersweet beauty of love in all its forms

Readers looking for gorgeous language and richly developed atmosphere will be impressed and moved… A queer coming-of-age novel that achieves rare peaks of lyricism and emotional intensity

Illuminates the complexity of gay adolescence with exceptional insight and graceful prose… a must-read for fans of Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor

A beautiful coming of age story about two teenage boys in rural England, exploring sexual awakening and desire as well as the human need for love. Hewitt's writing will stop you in your tracks.

Young love: we’ve all known its roiling agonies and shimmering ecstasies… It is the totalising force of youthful infatuation that forms Hewitt’s true subject, and it has rarely been documented with such fidelity and tenderness

This is a story of love in all its guises and faces and places… It is a year of imperishable moments and yearnings as love is unveiled in its many splendours

The poet and author of All Down Darkness Wide captures the sweet intoxication and great agony of adolescence in his debut novel – a luminous portrayal of two teenagers bonding with each other over one heady, transformative year

A luminescent debut from one of the most brilliant young poets writing today. Open, Heaven is a gorgeous, heartbreaking queer coming-of-age novel on the unrelenting yearning and agony of first love

Seán Hewitt's lyrical, elegiac novel tenderly unfolds a queer coming-of-age and makes a case for the primacy of first love – even if unrequited, even if lost

Full of teenage longing and quiet devastations, Hewitt’s Open, Heaven proves the continued staying power of poets-turned-novelists… Fans of Call Me By Your Name will enjoy this rumination on the angst of a first love, set across one transformative year

Poet Seán Hewitt’s debut novel of youthful infatuation

Full of yearning and lush descriptions of the English countryside

On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. As he contends with the expectations of his family, his burgeoning desire – an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex – threatens to unravel his shy exterior.Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, but underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own.With the passing seasons, the two teenagers grow closer and the bond that emerges between them transforms their lives. James falls deeply for Luke, yet he 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?

Seán Hewitt

Praise for Open, Heaven

An exquisite tale of first love . . . Hewitt is superb in his loving and acute descriptions of the natural world

Heart-rending . . . sensuous and decadent

A beautiful novel about how a first love can shape a whole life

An exquisite tale of first love . . . Hewitt is superb in his loving and acute descriptions of the natural world

Heart-rending . . . sensuous and decadent

A beautiful novel about how a first love can shape a whole life

An exquisite tale of first love . . . Hewitt is superb in his loving and acute descriptions of the natural world

Heart-rending . . . sensuous and decadent

A beautiful novel about how a first love can shape a whole life

Books by Seán Hewitt

Articles featuring Seán Hewitt

10 must-read books by Irish authors

Books that will change your perspective on love

Debut novels of 2025: discover the year’s breakthrough new voices

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter