Hannah Sullivan is a British academic and poet. Her collection “How to Wash a Heart” won the prestigious 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize.
Life and Career
Hannah Sullivan was born on 3 January 1979. Sullivan attended Trinity College, Cambridge, earning a star first in Classics in 2000. She spent a year at Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar, studying comparative literature, and subsequently obtained a Master of Research (M.Res) in cultural studies at the London Consortium. She returned to Harvard University to work on a Ph.D. in English and American literature, which she received in 2008.
Sullivan has been an associate professor of English at New College, Oxford since 2012. In 2013, Sullivan published “The Work of Revision”, an academic study of how revision and rewriting influenced the style of literary modernism, for which she received the 2014 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and the 2014 University English Book Prize. In 2018, she published her first poetry collection, “Three Poems”, which won the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize for the best new poetry collection published in Great Britain or Ireland.
Award and Legacy
Her collection “How to Wash a Heart” won the prestigious 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize.
In 2020, Sullivan also won one of eight Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes. She has received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors.
Sullivan’s work continues to inspire readers and writers around the world. Her exploration of identity and the immigrant experience in “How to Wash a Heart” has been particularly impactful.
She is currently a lecturer in creative writing at King’s College London, where she influences the next generation of writers and thinkers.
She has also received the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship from the University of Cambridge.
In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.