Born in 1979, Hannah Sullivan is a British poet and academic known for her innovative work in both fields. She studied Classics at Cambridge and earned a PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard. Sullivan currently teaches at New College, Oxford, where she has been an Associate Professor since 2012. Her scholarly work includes The Work of Revision (2013), which examines the role of revision in Modernist literature and won several awards. Her debut poetry collection, Three Poems (2018), garnered critical acclaim, winning the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2023, she published her second collection, Was It for This, further solidifying her reputation as a leading contemporary poet.
What books are on your bedside table?
None at home, where I have a perch just wide enough for a lamp and a glass of water. Right now we're on the island of Kalamos and some of my holiday reading is splayed out: Jenny Erpenbeck's brilliant Kairos, Ted Hughes's New and Selected Poems, and Benjamin Labatut's new novel about von Neumann, The Maniac. I also have a battered old Loeb of the Odyssey (volume 1; I once read Greek quite well, now I pick my way through). I think I can see Ithaca from the window, draped in cloud, but it could be another island. My constant sense of geographical confusion since arriving – the many tiny uninhabited islands nestling up to larger ones, the dazzle from the water, the beaches facing in every direction – make the plot seem suddenly realistic!
Which book or author do you always return to?
Ulysses: the book containing everything, including the Odyssey.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
Avid and undemanding. My older son, now 9, shows much better taste. I once spent a whole summer reading biographies of tennis players and books about astrology. I also loved historical novels, anything about time travel (The Story of the Amulet but also Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov), and was quite obsessed with the 38 Just William books.
When working on a new project, how do you sift through competing ideas in order to move forward?
As a poet, the problem doesn't seem to be competing ideas; it's competing sounds, problems of form, not finding the right form for the idea, or finding a form that seems right and then discovering that it's disappointingly difficult to work.
What writing habit do you have that is impossible to shift? (e.g., a particular snack, writing hours, location, caffeine consumption, etc.)
The fussy habit of saving each day's work as a new file. This creates a numerical series of false starts and missed possibilities which runs alongside the main working draft and which I can never bear to reopen.
Also, alas, working late at night when the rest of the house is asleep.
The internationales literaturfestival berlin (ilb) has become essential to Berlin’s literary calendar. What do you connect with the city?
The elegant courtyards of the Hackesche Hofe where I once spent a summer learning German. The difficulty of learning German in a city where everyone seems to speak fluent English. Isherwood, Benjamin and the intermezzo of the 1920s. Amaretto sours with my friend Alex. The mesmerizing Fernsehturm. Eating goose and red cabbage as snow fell in Prenzlauer Berg at Christmas (our short December honeymoon). Being young.