A Reading & Conversation with Seán Hewitt
moderated by Andrew Dolan
discussing Hewitt's new novel, Open, Heaven
in partnership with Politics and Prose Bookstore
WHEN: Sunday, April 13, 2025 at 3pm
WHERE: Politics and Prose at Connecticut Avenue (5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008)
PRICE: Free
Join Solas Nua and Politics and Prose Bookstore for a reading and conversation with Irish author, Seán Hewitt. Our Executive Director, Andrew Dolan, will moderate the conversation.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other's lives.
James --a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old --is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village's leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his reach: autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents --his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man --Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him "like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre," drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke's bravado is a deep wound --a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.
Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seán Hewitt is a poet, memoirist, novelist and literary critic.
His debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their "30 under 30" artists in Ireland.
His book J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism was published with Oxford University Press (2021).
His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in non-fiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Polari Prize, the Michel Déon Prize, and for a LAMBDA award. He won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022.
300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World, illustrated by Luke Edward Hall, was published in 2023. A second collection of poetry, Rapture's Road, was published in 2024, and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. His work has been translated into more than 10 languages.
