Sarah Howe is a British poet and editor. Her first book, 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. 

She taught poetry and creative writing for many years at King’s College London, before taking up the role of Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus (an imprint of Penguin UK).  

In 2018, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her honours include a Hawthornden Fellowship and the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry, as well as fellowships from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She is a Trustee of the Griffin International Poetry Foundation and serves on the Board of Ledbury Poetry Festival. She is an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool.

Her work has previously appeared in journals including POETRY, the London Review of Books, the TLS, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Financal Times, The Poetry Review and Poetry London. She has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio 3 and 4.

Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. After studying at Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar, she wrote a PhD on the ‘mind’s eye’ in Renaissance English poetry at the University of Cambridge. As an academic, she was a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before taking up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at University College London.

Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. In 2013, she was selected  as a Fellow of the groundbreaking Complete Works mentorship scheme for poets of colour, founded by Bernardine Evaristo. 

With Vidyan Ravinthiran and Dai George, she founded and co-edited Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism that attracted a global readership and several prize nominations across its five-year lifespan. She guest edited an issue of The Poetry Review in 2016 and of Poetry London in 2017. 

With Professor Sandeep Parmar, she co-founded the Ledbury Poetry Critics programme in 2017. To date, 30 critics of colour have benefited from its year-long intensive mentorship programme, widely credited with increasing the visibility of poets and critics of colour in the UK.