Seán Hewitt, winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his 2022 memoir All Down Darkness Wide, will give a public reading from his new book followed by a conversation with J. D. Sargan, assistant professor of English, and an audience Q&A session. The event is presented by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts as part of its Global Georgia public events series, in partnership with the department of English, the Creative Writing Program, and Avid Bookshop.

Hewitt will read from his forthcoming novel Open, Heaven, which will be published in the U.S. on April 15 by Penguin Random House.

Hewitt was born in 1990. His earlier works include J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism and the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which was awarded the Laurel Prize 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. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World, and has been shortlisted for the world’s largest and most prestigious literary award for young writers, the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, for his 2024 poetry collection Rapture's Road. Hewitt is a book critic for the Irish Times and teaches modern British and Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.