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Fionnuala McHugh

The Hong Kong-born poet Sarah Howe has a lovely voice. People have commented on it so often that she wrote a line about it in her new collection, Foretokens.
“From my teens, well-meaning adults would exclaim, ‘You have a lovely voice!’” she writes in her poem World Service. “Not picking up my flush of shame, they’d keep going. ‘When you grow up, you should be on the BBC!’”
Those modulated tones were drummed into her when she moved from Hong Kong to England aged seven, the daughter of a British father and a mother from China’s Guangdong province. She was sent to elocution classes, as she writes, “along with the other suburban offspring of Asian parents, driven by anxiety or aspiration that we shouldn’t sound like them”.
In the poem, her mother tells her about an interesting interview she has heard recently on the radio. It was Howe, unrecognisable to her mother’s ear.
“That was all true,” says Howe, wryly, on a recent morning in a London arts cafe. “And maybe it says something about our relationship. We have a dance of mutual awkwardness, not wanting to encroach on each other’s terrain. I feel that it’s like a comedy of errors. This book is partly about us missing and missing and missing each other.”

Foretokens is a follow-up to Howe’s first collection, Loop of Jade, published in 2015. Until then, she had been an academic who had studied at Harvard and Cambridge and wanted to explore her own uncertainties about family, place and identity.
She was inspired by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who referred to a mythical Chinese encyclopaedia called Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge that listed animals under such categories as “belonging to the emperor”, “having just broken the water pitcher” or “drawn with a very fine camelhair brush”.
Howe took up this literary joke to describe the places and objects in her world. Her first poem was Mother’s Jewellery Box. The list of items acts as a trigger.
To avoid Western sentimentality, she inserted parodies that some critics did not always grasp; the poem Tame about a wild goose, for instance, is a wink at writer Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. Meanwhile, her mother’s history slowly unfurls: a baby girl abandoned in 1948 on a rubbish heap, saved “from being eaten by the dogs” by an impoverished woman, then brought by her to a cockroach-infested tenement near Hong Kong’s Possession Street.

When Loop of Jade won the 2015 TS Eliot Prize, Howe, then 32, found herself the public object of racism and misogyny. In its own way, it was a book about classification – and it turned out, with horrible irony, that being female, partly Chinese, relatively young and a first-timer meant, at least for some, she did not fit the category of deserving winner.
She was stunned by the ensuing storm. “I felt terribly exposed, which is not really the place to write,” she says.
Her success and its detractors combined to bring about near silence. In the following years, she accepted a few poetic commissions – she liked shaping specific requests – but she could not generate her own work. She had two children. Early motherhood “shattered” her.
In her new collection, there is a poem called Forget repair in which she compares herself to “a china soup tureen” she sees hidden in a museum store. It has been broken and its “emptied belly” has been lashed together with a scar of big iron staples. In the final line, she writes, “I think I know what you endured.”
It was a therapist who told her she must write a poem a week. At first, the words came slowly. She wrote A History of My Relationship with My Mother in Twenty-three Arguments about the Laundry. She wrote about her son’s first nightmare. She wrote about hoarding, memory, genetics, Hong Kong.

Her father died towards the end of the pandemic and she wrote about his death in hospital. Eventually, she could hardly keep up with her compulsion. “I had to give myself a deadline and three months before it, something went click and all these poems began pouring out.”
She describes Loop of Jade as the call and Foretokens as the response. The second, at least for this reader, is an even better book.
There are echoes of that first literary outing a decade ago, but now the modulated voice is more intimate, more accessible and occasionally more angry.
Her father, for instance, emerges as the classic British expatriate who had been a door-to-door insurance salesman in London, who found the good life in what he called “the Far East” and who ended up living – with his Chinese second wife and his second family – in a 25th-floor flat on Kennedy Road in Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels.
Loop of Jade had already supplied careful glimpses of this man: “My father, who in his affable moods, always thinks you want a gin and tonic too.” But in Foretokens, she refers to darker moods, to the parent who glanced up from his paper to comment on her mother’s washing obsession – “This house looks like a Chinese laundry” – and spoke no Cantonese. She makes a comparison to colonised and coloniser. In a recent – yes, BBC – radio interview, she described herself as her mother’s protector “from the world, from my dad”.
“My father’s passing away was probably one of the things that changed the character of this book,” she says.
“I showed both my parents Loop of Jade and I was, by far, more worried about what my dad would think. I’d even Post-it-Noted the poems I thought might be problematic. In retrospect, I think he probably didn’t even read it. He was just uncomplicatedly proud and delighted.”

Howe says she “deeply” loved him. He gave her a pet name – Bear, because she loved polar bears – still used by everyone in the family except her mother.
“He’s probably the parent who was straightforwardly giving and loving in a way that was never really the case with my mum who, I think, was never able to get beyond the place of being the rejected child cowering in the corner.”
After he had gone, there were the usual postmortem clear-outs. The first poem in Foretokens is about a calendar her mother had kept. “Hoarding, I’ve learnt, is a mark of the emigrant,” writes Howe. With full-colour photos of long-vanished buildings, it was labelled Beautiful Hong Kong 1983, the year of Howe’s birth.
On it, her mother had highlighted her due date in October. Howe counts back nine months to the date she “sparked into being”: February, with its photo of fireworks “like red anemones” over ghostly office blocks. The poem tracks her fetal growth – by March, there is “a crescent moon of spine”. Writing, we learn, can be a mark of the emigrant’s child.
Howe, who in person is as pleasing as her voice, agonises about exploitation. As far as she knows, her mother has never read her work. In one poem, which is not about her mother but a friend dying of cancer, she writes, “I recently resolved never again to make a poem from another’s pain.”
Yet she knows she violates this by speculating, for example, on the exact relationship between her mother and the woman who had, apparently, adopted her. In an old photograph of them, Howe is startled to see how much they resemble one another. She wonders if the long-told backstory was a myth. Was that woman a sex worker who was also her real grandmother?
“I do feel I’m allowing myself to be more real and vulnerable in this book than perhaps I was in Loop of Jade,” she says. “But who I am, and the particular colonial circumstances in which I grew up, mean that it’s very hard to know when you’re being true or authentic or unguarded.”

When an organiser for a book reading asked her recently if she minded being described as a “Hong Kong poet”, she was thrilled to be included in the category.
She says she does not open Loop of Jade any more. In this new collection, there are gems of tightly controlled, highly polished work, but it is evident she is moving towards looser, lengthier narratives.
“The poems have got much longer, to the point that it’s troublesome at readings,” she says, with a smile. “They try the patience of the audience.”
That was not apparent a few nights later when she held a sold-out reading from Foretokens at the London Review Bookshop. The book’s title, incidentally, includes a sly dig at those who accused her of being a token prizewinner a decade ago.
“I’m a little rusty,” she told her listeners. Then she began to speak, in her own lovely words.
On October 5, Howe was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2025. The winner will be announced on January 19, 2026.
Foretokens is published by Chatto & Windus.


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Hong Kong-born poet stunned into silence by detractors finds voice again with Foretokens

Hong Kong-born poet Sarah Howe, who won the 2015 TS Eliot prize for Lope of Jade, recently published her new collection of poetry, Foretokens. Photo: Marc Lixenberg

Howe as a child in Hong Kong. Her poems often reflect on her upbringing in Hong Kong and the UK, and her English father and Chinese mother. Photo: courtesy of Sarah Howe

Howe as a child with her mother, whose traumatic early years had a profound effect on their relationship. Photo: courtesy of Sarah Howe

Howe was stunned at the misogyny and racism she experienced after winning the 2015 TS Eliot Prize. Photo: Marc Lixenberg

Howe as a child with her parents in Hong Kong. Photo: courtesy of Sarah Howe

Howe in Hong Kong in 2016, a year after she won the TS Eliot Prize. Photo: Dickson Lee

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Sarah Howe’s new collection comes a decade after her TS Eliot Prize win as a young part-Chinese female was met with racism and misogyny


Sarah Howe’s new collection comes a decade after her TS Eliot Prize win as a young part-Chinese female was met with racism and misogyny.


Hong Kong

Hong Kong-born poet stunned into silence by detractors finds voice again with Foretokens

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Sarah Howe’s new collection comes a decade after her TS Eliot Prize win as a young part-Chinese female was met with racism and misogyny

Sarah Howe’s new collection comes a decade after her TS Eliot Prize win as a young part-Chinese female was met with racism and misogyny