A luminous memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a tender exploration of queer identity.

'Beautiful' Colm Tóibín
'Rapturous' New York Times
'Extraordinary' Observer
'Stunning' Sunday Times

When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face to face with crisis.

Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope.

All Down Darkness Wide is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a fearless exploration of a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds.

WINNER OF THE ROONEY PRIZE FOR IRISH LITERATURE 2022

'Extraordinarily beautiful... the best new work of non-fiction I've read in years' Sarah Perry

'Rigorous and sensual... Hewitt has forged a life-enhancing memoir' Spectator

A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon * Sunday Times *
A remarkable memoir of love and sorrow * Observer *
We are witnessing the emergence of a major talent... stunning. A space will need to be made on the Queer Classics shelf * Irish Independent *
Intensely original... some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years -- Alexander Chee * The Atlantic *
Exquisitely written... a fervent appeal for presence and belonging -- Claire Messud * Harper's Magazine *
Hewitt's book is excellent... It makes one hope this is the beginning of a wonderful trend of men writing about love with the same intense vulnerability that women have for decades now... [Hewitt] shows himself to be one of our foremost memoirists... A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon. Let us hope it is but a first volume, the beginning of a vast work. * Sunday Times *
Rapturous... even his depictions of cruising have a holy aura. As a dedicated nonfiction writer, I sometimes meet poets' memoirs with a caginess that is utterly disgraced by a book like this, whose structure is nearly as immaculate as its sentences... Writing is always an act of translation, and Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own. -- Melissa Febos * New York Times *
[An] extraordinary memoir... All Down Darkness Wide is not about answers. It does not offer glib consolations and is all the more powerful and affecting for that. * Observer *
Some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years... intensely original. -- Alexander Chee * The Atlantic *
[P]oignant and painful, rigorous and sensual... Hewitt has forged a life-enhancing memoir... This book stands alongside Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast as an outstanding chronicle of a gay poet's journey of self-discovery. -- Michael Arditti * The Spectator *

Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.