Watch & Listen
Poem for TEDx Harvard College, November 2015
Lecture at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, October 2015
Reading at Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, October 2014
In Conversation at the Hong Kong Book Fair, July 2016
‘Relativity’: A Poem for Stephen Hawking
‘Physicists and poets may differ in discipline, but both seek to communicate the beauty of the world around us. For National Poetry Day, Sarah Howe brings light to life in her poem “Relativity.” Please enjoy this reading, filmed by Bridget Smith.’
~ Stephen Hawking, 8th October 2015
Read more about the project, commissioned for National Poetry Day 2015, in the Guardian and Paris Review.
Listen to me reading from Loop of Jade
Poetry Archive Recording, October 2017
Podcasts
Scottish Poetry Library Podcast with Jennifer Williams, September 2016
Guardian Books Podcast: Poetry, music and identity with Sarah Howe, Emmy the Great and Solomon OB, January 2016
Radio & Television
In 2019, I appeared as a guest in the BBC Radio 4 documentary, The Poetry Editor, written and presented by Faber poet Dr Hannah Sullivan to discuss my experience of the poetry editorial process at Chatto & Windus.
In October 2017, I contributed a sequence of new poems to an episode of Radio 4’s Conversations on a Bench, set in London's Chinatown. My poems drew on oral testimonies collected by the producer Anna Scott-Brown, who spent a number of weeks sitting on a bench outside a bubble tea shop in Gerrard Street hearing stories from passers-by: the life on hold of an illegal immigrant, the gambler who has lost everything and found God but who is still fighting his addiction, the woman whose father committed suicide after the handover of Hong Kong to China, the political exile turned lawyer, the successful businessman, the artist and the chef.
My short verse drama, Telemachus, aired on BBC Radio 4 in April 2017. A poetic radio play for three voices, it charts the voyage of a Chinese migrant factory worker back to his village in the countryside, visiting a teenage daughter raised by her grandmother at home. Telemachus was commissioned as part of The Odyssey Project: My Name is Nobody, a series of ten responses to Homer's epic by poets from migrant and immigrant backgrounds.
After Loop of Jade was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize in January 2016, I was interviewed on BBC Radio’s Front Row, Free Thinking, Outlook and The World This Weekend. After winning The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award in December 2015, I was interviewed and read a poem on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. I also spoke to the BBC World Service’s World Update about my work as a poet and an editor at Prac Crit.
For National Poetry Day 2015, I was broadcast reading my work between shows on More4, as part of the ‘Poetry Takeover’ Channel 4 curated across their television stations. On the same day, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme broadcast an extract from ‘Relativity’, my poem for Stephen Hawking, commissioned to explore the National Poetry Day theme of ‘light.’ Earlier in 2015, my reading in the Proms Extra Lates summer season was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Cerys Matthews featured my work on her BBC 6 Music show.
In 2013, two of my poems were broadcast in the first series of Radio 4’s The Echo Chamber, the BBC’s new flagship programme on contemporary poetry. In 2010, Radio 3’s Words and Music featured a poem of mine, alongside work by other young British poets including Adam O’Riordan, Matthew Gregory, and Liz Berry. I have also read my work on BBC Radio London to promote National Poetry Day.
I have been involved, as a contributor on Renaissance poetry and its afterlives, with two Radio 4 poetry documentaries. For Suckers! Poet and Parasite, I recorded a segment about John Donne’s poem ‘The Flea’, while looking through a microscope at the Natural History Museum’s entomology collection. For The Electric Polyolbion, Paul Farley and I recorded part of the programme on Helidon Hill, near Rugby, where we discussed the significance of that particular British landscape to the Jacobean poet, Michael Drayton.