The boys appear not to be happy.

When the UK’s top prize for poetry, the TS Eliot Prize, was awarded to first-time poet Sarah Howe for her book Loop of Jade (Chatto) earlier this month, a whoop of joy went up in the room. Later at the party, I heard someone say: “I wonder how long it will be before everyone begins to hate her.” Not long, as it happens.

Three dodgy newspaper articles and a trending Twitter hashtag – #derangedpoetess – later, literary press is making clear its views on poets who are a) women, b) young, c) well-educated, and d) not fully white. Howe ticks all boxes: she is 32, a Cambridge-educated academic currently at Harvard, and is half Chinese. Born in Hong Kong, she came to the UK when she was nine; Loop of Jade deals with her dual cultural heritage and her mother’s difficult family history. She also happens to be – it shouldn’t matter, but apparently it does – rather beautiful.

Venerable organ Private Eye leads the doughty charge, so outraged that the TS Eliot judges saw fit to “pointedly” award the £20,000 prize to a debut book that it accuses them of some kind of plot.

How did Sarah Howe win TS Eliot prize, asks Private Eye pic.twitter.com/z35dsreRMj — Charles Whalley (@charleswhalley) January 21, 2016

The anonymous columnist writes that Loop of Jade “didn’t win the giant-free (and so less challenging) Forward first collection prize… more strikingly, it was not chosen by the Poetry Book Society (PBS), which oversees the TS Eliot Prize, as one of its quarterly ‘choices’… Nor was it picked as one of the five ‘recommended’ runners-up per quarter”. None of these three factors are in any way prerequisites.

Private Eye concludes that because “the body behind the award had so firmly rejected” this book that the question begs itself: “was it perhaps, as some suggested, for extra-poetic reasons? As a successful and very “presentable” young woman…”

Meanwhile, on Wednesday the Times Literary Supplement, in a column called Identity Crisis, called Howe’s win one of “a series of successes on the British prize circuit for persons of colour”, then goes on mainly about writers of colour objecting to being given tokenistic prizes.



It quotes New York poet Morgan Parker in her blog post on the Poetry Foundation site: “You will never stop wondering if your attention and success is only because of your race or gender or orientation. You will never stop wondering if you are being exoticised.” But I don’t see Sarah Howe exoticising herself. Loop of Jade is a fine book, quietly and beautifully written.

Today’s trending hashtag, #derangedpoetess, was born from all this coverage, sparked by a Twitter storm about Oliver Thring’s interview with Howe in the Sunday Times last week. Posted on social media, it immediately attracted comment for its derisive terms of faint praise: “Howe’s thin new volume... took her ten years to write...” Thring says, describing speaking to “...this Cambridge English don whose PhD, she says, was on ‘visual imagination and visual vividness in language’ is to undergo a tutorial sprinkled with wordy phrases...” She “barks a nervous laugh”; her verse “pummels the reader with allusion, scholarship, and a brusque, sixth-formy emphasis on her own intelligence.” It is entirely dismissive.

Here it is pic.twitter.com/WtZpfA2FRz — Amy Key (@msamykey) January 22, 2016

Thring may not be much of a poetry reader – of course he wants to talk about her husband and the furnishings. But facts are easy to check: Howe really is a Renaissance scholar, and her PhD really was on this subject – it doesn’t need quotation marks. And if hyperreality and interleavings are a wordy “pummeling”, one hopes for Mr Thring’s sake that Sir Geoffrey Hill or Jeremy Prynne never wins a big prize.



The author’s claim not to be sexist wasn’t exactly helped by his tweet: “This gentle interview with a leading young poet has led various deranged poetesses to call me thick, sexist etc”. Here’s the thing: people who don’t belittle women also don’t use the term ‘poetesses’.

This gentle interview with a leading young poet has led various deranged poetesses to call me thick, sexist etc... https://t.co/AN5F2TDbzM — Oliver Thring (@oliverthring) January 22, 2016

So here we have had three male-centric media bastions – and check the VIDA figures if you think I’m making that up – damning a 30-something woman for having won a major book award. They’ve got her on her education, her vocabulary, her “tasteful” home and her looks – everything but her poetry. They don’t like it. One well-known male poet summed it up perfectly on Facebook: “Someone’s taken away their ball”.



Katy Evans-Bush is a poet. Her latest book is Forgive the Language: Essays on Poets & Poetry (published by Penned in the Margins).