Harry Owen
AWARDS & HONOURS:
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- Poet Laureate, Cheshire, UK, 2003
- Founded Reddits Poetry 2008
- Std Bank Ovation Award, Natl Arts Festival 2020
- Shortlisted South African Natl Poetry Prize 2023​​​​​​​
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​(Photo credit: Roddy Fox)​
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Hailing from Liverpool, UK, Harry Owen made literary history as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Cheshire in 2003 during his residence in Congleton. In January 2008, he relocated to the Eastern Cape of South Africa, where he founded and hosted Reddits Poetry, a successful open-floor poetry event that thrived for over a decade.
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Harry holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Pretoria. His work is widely recognized and published in an array of literary magazines, journals, and anthologies across South Africa, the UK, and the USA in esteemed publications such as Orbis, Magma, Iota, Stanzas, New Contrast, The Cortland Review, Johannesburg Review of Books, Kalahari Review, About Place Journal, For the Silent, among many others.
An ardent advocate for environmental issues, Harry is the author of ten poetry collections, including Searching for Machynlleth (NPF Publications, 2000), Small Stones for Bromley (Lapwing, 2014), The Cull: New and Resurrected Poems (Poets Printery, 2017), Thicket: Shades from the Eastern Cape (Minimal Press, 2021), and for... (Bicornis Press, 2024). His forthcoming collection will be published by Quilled Ink Press.
In addition to his poetry, Harry has edited the following three anthologies with Poets Printery: I Write Who I Am: An Anthology of Upstart Poems (2011); Coming Home: Poems of the Grahamstown Diaspora (2019); and For Rhino in a Shrinking World: An International Anthology (2013).
Harry's artistic collaboration with photographer Roddy Fox earned them the Standard Bank Ovation Award at the 2020 National Arts Festival for their project In Tandem. Renowned for his readings and performances, both in-person and online (notably with Cape Town’s ‘Off The Wall Poetry’ and ‘The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Collective’), he was shortlisted for the South African National Poetry Prize in 2023.
After thirteen years in Grahamstown/Makhanda, Harry now resides with his wife in the picturesque village of Kylemore, nestled among the mountains and vineyards near Stellenbosch in the Western Cape.
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'Magic for me is the feeling that my own heartbeat, my own breathing, is as a response to and in parallel with a heartbeat and a breath that is already out there'
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- Harry Owen
Harry Owen's Books
'Note how we emasculate our world:
pain’s just the way we make sense of things.
Question me, then. I’ll have no answer.'
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- Harry Owen
