Susannah Dickey’s true crime-inspired collection wins inaugural PEN Heaney Prize with 'sheer brio'

Susannah Dickey’s collection, ISDAL (Picador Poetry), which satirises the true crime genre with "sheer brio", has been crowned the winner of the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize.

Dickey was revealed as the winner at a ceremony on Monday evening (2nd December) held at the Great Hall, Queen’s University Belfast, in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s.

The PEN Heaney Prize, founded in 2024, recognises a single volume of poetry by one author, published in the UK or Ireland, of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships. It is co-ordinated by English PEN, together with Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney.

The inaugural PEN Heaney Prize was judged by poets Nick Laird, Paula Meehan and Shazea Quraishi, with Catherine Heaney joining them as non-voting chair and representing the Estate of Seamus Heaney.

The other shortlisted titles included The Coming Thing by Martina Evans (Carcanet Poetry), Hyena! by Fran Lock (Poetry Bus Press), Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness (Cape Poetry), We Play Here by Dawn Watson (Granta Poetry) and A Tower Built Downwards by Yang Lian, translated by Brian Holton (Bloodaxe Books). They were selected from across 126 submissions.

Of the winning title, the judging panel said: “Susannah Dickey’s ISDAL is an astonishingly inventive look at a cold case, that of an unidentified woman found in 1970 near Bergen in Norway. Armed with a wide variety of forms and a formidable vocabulary, Dickey explores and satirises the true crime genre, and specifically our culture’s obsession with female victims.”

Dickey said: “I’m delighted to have won the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize. The Heaney family continues to do such brilliant work in Seamus’ name, and the mission statement of this prize is such a necessary one.

“I believe poetry to be uniquely capable of querying and critiquing the linguistic structures that underpin the systems which dictate our lives, and in my mind there’s no doubt that Heaney was one of the very best to do it.”

Ruth Borthwick, chair of English PEN, said: “Susannah has written an extraordinary, inventive collection that challenges us, with playful parody, to examine our obsession with true crime podcasts. Susannah’s words are startling and delighting; they open our minds, detonating fresh ideas and images in the synapses.”

She added: “The PEN Heaney Prize has been a long-held ambition of English PEN and Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann. We are enormously grateful to the Estate of Seamus Heaney, Hawthornden Foundation and to our inaugural judges, for making it possible. We wanted to honour Seamus Heaney as a poet who was as warmly humane as he was magnificently talented.

"He was concerned to offer encouragement, advice and attention to fellow poets—both of his own generation, and those younger writers who often sent him unsolicited manuscripts. In this context, it seems fitting that a debut poet from Derry, the county of Seamus’s birth, is our first winner.”

Catherine Dunne, chair of Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann, said: “At Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann, an all-island organisation, we feel privileged to have worked closely with English PEN and the Estate of Seamus Heaney in the awarding of the PEN Heaney Prize 2024.” She praised the “rich and diverse shortlist”.

Dunne added: “Dickey’s ISDAL is poetry that explores the impact of individual cultural events on the human condition without ever losing ‘its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness’.

"With an underlying theme of violence against women, and society’s obsession with ‘true crime’, this collection directs our focus to the wider world in a way that chimes perfectly with PEN’s emphasis on human rights and the promotion of literature that serves to illuminate and engage. In Seamus Heaney’s own words: ‘I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.’"

Catherine Heaney said: “In an incredibly strong field of contenders that reflected the richness and multiplicity of voices and subjects contained within collections published in 2023, ISDAL stood out for its formal inventiveness, engagement with themes in popular culture and sheer brio.”

The inaugural PEN Heaney Prize is supported by Hawthornden Foundation and the Estate of Seamus Heaney.