Hannah Sullivan

Hannah Sullivan, born in 1979, is a British academic and poet. She studied Classics, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and holds a PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard University. After working as an Assistant Professor at Stanford University, she has been teaching as an Associate Professor at New College, Oxford, since 2012.

In 2013, she published her study »The Work of Revision«, in which she argues that the emergence of literary modernism with its specific modes of writing would not have been conceivable without the development of new strategies for drafting and revising, and that these methods still shape our idea of good writing today.

Sullivan’s first volume of poetry, »Three Poems«, was published in 2018 and was awarded the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize and the John Pollard International Prize for the best poetry debut in Great Britain and Ireland in the same year. In three long poems, Sullivan devotes herself to fundamental life experiences: life as a young adult in a large American city, the birth of a child, the death of a parent. Her deft and humorous poems are extremely accessible as narratives but are also characterized by an inventive range of verse form. The volume contains rhyming couplets, quatrains, sections of terza rima, a sonnet, and looser free verse in both short and long lines. »The New York Times« wrote that throughout this volume, »You follow this author wherever she takes you.«

Sullivan’s second volume of poetry, »Was It for This« (2023), also consists of three long poems. The photo on the cover – the author as a little girl pulling a toy truck outside her childhood home – illustrates the book’s preoccupation with psychogeography. The first poem, »Tenants«, is an elegy for the victims of the fire in London‘s Grenfell Tower, which claimed the lives of 72 people in 2017; the author, who had recently become a mother, lived nearby at the time of the disaster. The other two pieces, one an autobiographical memoir in prose, the other a tightly worked iambic meditation about looking for life’s exact midpoint, explore how we live in space and time and are set in the suburbs of west London.

Hannah Sullivan lives in Oxford with her husband and two children.

Status: April 2024

The Work of Revision
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, 2013

Three Poems
Faber and Faber
London, 2018

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York, 2020

Was It for This
Faber and Faber
London, 2023

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York, 2023