'Why am I not always in a meadow of flowers?': Seán Hewitt in Conversation with Elmos Andrews /

'Why am I not always in a meadow of flowers?': Seán Hewitt in Conversation with Elmos Andrews

Published on 8th September 2025

Seán Hewitt, the recipient of the 2022 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, is a writer of remarkable formal flexibility. He has published two poetry collections, a book of academic literary criticism, a memoir, an anthology of short stories, and now also a novel. Tongues of Fire, his first poetry collection, won the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award, while his second, Rapture’s Road, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize; his memoir All Down Darkness Wide was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, the Foyles Book of the Year in non-fiction, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Polari Prize, the Michel Déon Prize, and a LAMBDA award. Seán teaches at Trinity College Dublin.

I first met him after the publication of All Down Darkness Wide, and here we speak for a second time, in the middle of his book-tour for Open, Heaven, out this year. I’ve been reading Seán’s work for a while and, despite its shifts across and between forms, it always remains perfectly his: a keen, descriptive eye that roves across the world and the page, an attention to the structures that make and break us, a grounding in experience that nevertheless never holds him back from leaps into the unknown and imagined. Open, Heaven is all of those things. It mourns, while recognising and celebrating the love and beauty that persist in the face of loss. We spoke about the novel, and about what it means, for a poet, to have written one.

(Elmos Andrews)

Describing the aftermath of a threesome in All Down Darkness Wide, you write: ‘Even then, I suppose, I was a poet, already in the irritating habit of turning life into metaphor.’ That was in a memoir; now you’ve published a novel. What is your relationship to that strange thing, form? What, now, are you?

That is a good question. I think that I increasingly think of myself as a writer. People often want to say a poet that wrote a novel. I think that if you write a novel, you’re then a novelist – I think that if I hadn’t written poems before, I would be a novelist. I take each form on its own terms, and so writer seems to cover what I do, which is write books.

I think it’s a case of what each form can contain or allow for: some ideas come as poems, some ideas have to be novels, some ideas have to be memoir. Having said that, though –with the novel, there’s something about invention, something that’s perhaps even more exposing than memoir. Mainly because I think the world of real life, which is what memoirs deal with, is just there: everyone has this real life, and you’re just kind of opening up this thing, though you’re also curating it and deciding what comes out and what doesn’t come out. Whereas with a novel, it’s the world of your imagination. If psychology deals with the world of your imagination, your fantasies and fictions, the stories you tell yourself, the subconscious interests that you have – I think fiction brings all those out in a way you’re less conscious of when you write it. So when I look back at the novel, it’s almost like I can see something that I wasn’t aware of, whereas with the memoir, I was quite aware of all that I was doing as I was writing it.

Novels are always, to some degree at least, quite exposing. Hence literary criticism. But what is your relationship to fiction, to fictionalising? In the acknowledgments of All Down Darkness Wide, you recognise that ‘in some cases I have compressed timelines and changed geographies, merged two or more individuals into one, invented characters and altered or invented certain other details.’ Rapture’s Road passes, it seems to me, from the real into a kind of dreamscape. You constantly fictionalise across all your books. How does imagination, the imaginary at the heart of that fictionalisation, operate across your different books, and for you as you went into writing them?

With Rapture’s Road, I was – I’m trying to say this without sounding extremely pretentious – I was interested in artifice, and the possibility of blurring the line between fiction and the real in a poem. I think because Tongues of Fire, maybe not even consciously – but all of the poems in Tongues of Fire came from real experience. With Rapture’s Road, it was something about the writing process. I had Tongues of Fire done and I wanted to not repeat myself, or not just do another book of poems that would feel similar. I started writing images, ideas – all in prose, in big documents. I had maybe 20,000 words of just notes towards things rather than poems, and I began to write the poems from that. But I was – I became less and less interested in even knowing exactly what the poems were about. They felt much more subconscious than conscious.

And then I thought: why does the speaker of the poem have to align so closely with a real-life person? Can it go somewhere else? Can it do something else? There’s a sort of liberation in fiction, in that way. Maybe that came from the fact that I was writing the novel at a similar time to Rapture’s Road. But it did offer some kind of liberation from life – especially if you’re used to writing from life. There comes a time when life catches up with what you’ve written about, and you think: OK, well, I can either wait for events to accumulate, or I can use my mind. It struck me as strange that I’d never really considered using my mind [laughs], so I began to do that instead. It’s not so much that there isn’t real experience behind the poems in Rapture’s Road; it’s just maybe the event is skewed from reality. The poems became like a little, decorated box in which I could hide little bits of truths, of ideas – that they could take on a slightly more secretive form.

But still: I don’t think the novel reads in any way like Rapture’s Road. At least in my head. But the novel was not going for the condensed, secretive style that I did in Rapture’s Road. I think the novel is somewhat – when I say looser, I don’t mean less considered, I just mean more fluid, or more open, lighter, in terms of its prose style.

I think Rapture’s Road does stand apart from your other three books, precisely because of this interplay between secrecy and exposure – which is, ultimately, also a question of legible autobiography. There are similarities in theme, and place, and idea, across all your works – all of which seem, or are so presented in All Down Darkness Wide, as in some way autobiographical. Elias’s attempted suicide retold, say, in “Kyrie” or “Härskogan” in Tongues of Fire. Open, Heaven is clearly no work of autofiction: the prologue, James’s divorce, signals it as such. And yet, certain autobiographical traces remain: the ‘Thornmere’ of the novel is fictional, but the ‘sandstone’ buildings, the canals, ‘the rugby club discos’ recall the village suburb of your own youth. How inflected are each of these books by your own biography?

I knew that the Open, Heaven was a novel from the very beginning, so I had no intention of autobiography. That said: I needed it to feel … The strange thing about fiction, and about writing prose fiction for the first time, is that, for me, for the first like three or four months I was very conscious that it felt made-up. And the last thing you want a novel to feel is very made-up. In some respects, you need to be able to imagine that this could happen to this person, in this place; it has to have the taste of believability.

Maybe my armoury against the possibility that it might feel not quite emotionally real was to supplement it with autobiographical elements that I knew were real, that had an emotional connection. The setting of the novel became a sort of amalgamation of places that I know: I gave it a different name to distinguish it, but nevertheless, if I was writing about a particular church or rugby club I know, in my head, which rugby club I’m talking about. Why invent a rugby club when you remember a rugby club? It’s all there; you know how to get from the downstairs bit upstairs, and where the changing rooms are, and you’re not going to confuse the reader because it’s a literal place that has architecture. That was a useful grounding technique – in reality. But from that reality you can extrapolate into fiction. I’m not so concerned with realism as a mode: at the end of the day, it’s a work of fiction, so the village can be, in some way, a heightened place – whether it’s in its kind of enclosure, or in its natural world. It can be removed from any real setting because it is a fictional setting.

But in the same way, anytime you make up a character, in order to feel that that character is genuine and believable – if I had a character who was lonely, you inevitably have to supplement your own recall of loneliness into the character. Or a character in love; you supplement your experience of that. Fiction is like a prism: the light of autobiography is shining into it, but it’s being splayed into all of these various things that are in some way unrecognisable as a real life, but nevertheless are informed by or sourced from an author. You’re still there behind the book. In a memoir, you are one speaker, and all experiences come from what that one speaker experiences. In a novel, you split it. At some points I might be Luke, at some point I might be James, at some point I might be the parent – you’re kind of splaying it through that prism. It’s a less cohesive trace of autobiography.

I wonder if it’s less a question of realism than one of memory. Memory is itself a kind of prism that filters; remembered places are always, in some fashion, an amalgamation. Memoir is the writerly practice of memory; Open, Heaven is itself presented as an active product of remembering. ‘I might be walking along a street and notice a smell, or see a stranger and mistake them for someone else, and then I am back there in the village,’ say. Memory structures one book, but also defines another, along with its protagonist. What sort of framework does memory offer?

When I first started the novel, I had the intention that it would be remembered from the end of that year – so it would be set over 2002 to 2003, but it would be told only from the perspective of the end of 2003. All over in one year. But maybe about a third of the way into writing it, I was in a café and what is now the opening section of the book came to me. That allowed me two things. One thing is that it transformed what I’d written into being a book about time and memory as much as anything else. It also gave me a very useful kind of authorly sleight of hand in that I didn’t have to have the voice of a 16-year-old narrate the book, which I didn’t want. A first-person narrator limits and guides what you can say in any given book, and I think you’re inevitably attracted to the sort of narratorial voice that allows you to explore the things you want to explore in the language you want to explore it. If I had a 16-year-old boy, I couldn't give him a believable lexicon that I might want to use. I couldn’t give him the sentences that I wanted to write in. It would have felt fake; he should speak in a different way.

But doing it through the lens of memory also allowed me to move, rapidly, sometimes, around the text – to skip through seasons, to have a kind of haziness on events, which would mean that you might be aware from an early stage that your narrator was not always reliable, or always giving you the full side of every story. There is the sort of occlusion of narrative that that allows – by which I mean: he’s not aware – just as the reader isn’t – of what happens after this year. He’s also blocking certain things about his younger brother out of his memory, or avoiding subjects. It also gives you a texture of guilt and loss that you can play with through the book, as well, as you said – if you want your book to have a sense of, which I did, to have a sense of a casting-out of Eden, in memory, he can believably romanticise the village of his youth without it feeling like the author is doing that. He becomes a sort of author of the book, and that is a useful distance to have. The divorce was a good way to separate him from me, and I also deliberately made him about four years older than me. I knew that I would have the temptation to make him more like me if I didn’t delineate the line at which he was not me in the book.

I suppose the structuring principle of Open, Heaven is loss, its narrative kickstarted, after all, by the end of a marriage. But your work often does tend towards elegy: for the loss of your father in Tongues of Fire, for murdered and suffering queers in All Down Darkness Wide and Rapture’s Road, for a love lost before it can even be realised, in Open, Heaven, for a past that is just too far gone and that yet never seems to leave. What does elegy mean to you? Elegy is a term usually applied to poetry; what is it doing in prose fiction and non-fiction?

This comes back to the memory point, and the temporality point, of Open, Heaven. I don’t mean this in a pessimistic way – but life is the accumulation of loss. The second we live through something, it’s gone. And as we go through life, we accumulate more and more losses. These are not necessarily big losses, like deaths. Last summer: it’s gone. Yes, there will be another one that you will like accumulate, but you’ll never have the exact same one again. I suppose if you’re interested – as I think I probably am – in time and the passage of time, you become interested in memory, loss, the persistence of things from the past. I think there’s a difference between elegy and the elegiac, and I think that the word elegiac is used in a much more capacious than the word elegy. I think elegy is a poetic form, and it tends to be person-centred – now you might have eco-elegy, but it is a centred thing. I think elegiac is more atmospheric. If people think of Open, Heaven as an elegy – I suppose maybe it is, but it I hadn't been something that I’d necessarily thought of, although I did think of an elegiac tone, which comes from memory, and the passage of time.

The more I’ve thought about the book afterwards, I wanted to leave open questions in the narrative, which people often hate; people love a novel that’s all tied up at the end. A lot of people have focused on this central relationship with Luke for James, but by the time I got close to the end of writing it, I thought, well, maybe this is a book about James’s younger brother, actually, and about what he can’t recover from a year in which he did not take his responsibility to his younger brother seriously. At the very beginning of the of the prologue, there is a line about James maybe seeing a young, lone boy who might nod to him in recognition or turn his back and walk across the fields and be gone. I think when I first wrote that I meant Luke. But the more I’ve considered it, the more I think, well, maybe it could be more than one boy. It could be his younger brother. I was quite subtle through the book about Eddie dying, to the point that some readers have asked me what’s Eddie doing in later life and I’ve been like, ummm – but it may be the case that, for some people, on a second reading, it becomes more clear, how the narrator feels about being responsible for the death of a child. In the very beginning, when he goes to the pub, the barman is talking about his mum in the graveyard behind him, and the narrator says that he didn’t want to think about the graveyard and walks off.

All of those things make this novel feel more like an elegy, after I’ve written it, than I perhaps intended at the start. I always knew that Eddie was going to die. I wrote an ending in which that was more obvious, to begin with; I wrote four or five versions of that last 2022 section, and I held them up to the novel and thought, well, what would that do if I had this ending, or what would it do if I had this one. I ended up opting for the ending that left more questions open in the narrative, rather than the one that closed them off, gave them away. Some people get frustrated with that sort of ending, but it’s the sort of ending I enjoy. It’s my book.

In Open, Heaven, the idea of beauty is in tension, not least because your own language-use is so beautiful: on the one hand we have the natural world, which may not be instructive but is beautiful, and then, on the other, we have James’s suffering for and because beauty. He explains that ‘sometimes I found the mere presence of the boys hard to bear, as though they were so beautiful that I couldn’t look at them.’ Does beauty surprise, or does it, perhaps, also bring pain?

Beauty brings a sort of confrontation with a peak of life that could be slightly overwhelming – a sort of epiphanic idea of what life could be, at any given time, and is so often not. Often my relationship to beauty is informed by the drudgery of life [laughs]. We often work in such ugly buildings, we have such kind of relentless, screens and emails and concrete; people having seizures on trains, and rail replacement buses [a reference to SH’s journey from Glasgow the day before]. So when I’m confronted with something beautiful, I get almost a sense of – I sound very pessimistic – of the entrapment of life, of the ways in which our lives are so often structured in ways antagonistic to the most beautiful things in the world that I think we’re probably naturally supposed to be surrounded by and enjoy, and have the opportunity to enjoy. We’re not supposed to be stuck in offices; we’re not supposed to be getting screen-time notifications that are like five hours a day. And so if anything is confronting and terrifying about beauty, it is that sense of waste that comes alongside it, the amount of time that we spend not in environments, or seeing things, that are sustaining to life and our sense of happiness. I’m the sort of person, as I think most people are, for whom beautiful things bring such happiness. But then the rest of my life is thrown into relief – to the point that I want to quit my job, or I’m like, why, what am I doing here? I will die one day; why am I not always in a meadow of flowers?

But I also think in Open, Heaven there’s a sense of beauty and terror, beauty and terror the sublimity of love – which is a terrifying experience because, for James, as I think for a lot of people, this witnessing of beauty, this realising of desire and being in love, is not just about sexual desire, although that is in there. It’s also that falling in love is a bit like – you begin to accumulate ideas of possible futures that your life might have, possible experiences. It’s not just: I really fancy that guy. It’s: where might we live one day? Where might we go on holiday? Would my life just be so much easier if I was loved in return? Luke becomes this gateway, for James, into all of this, into this better world, but James can only get there if Luke says yes and lets him in. There is a terror of looking at that gateway and trying to game your way in: if I do this, will I be more or less likely to get what I want? Will my life be better, or immeasurably worse, if I say I love you, to this person? That is a sort of terror, as well as a vision of beauty; beauty comes with the other side of the coin, which is fear.