About
Sylee Gore works across languages, images, and spaces. Her work explores how sustained attention deepens our encounters with the world.
Her awards include the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the Bird in Your Hand Prize, and the Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize. She is a 2025 U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry.
Born in Mumbai and raised in the United States, Sylee Gore has lived in Berlin for many years. She holds degrees in literature and languages from Cambridge, Oxford, and Stanford.
Her first poetry book, Maximum Summer, was published by Nion Editions in 2025 and is now out of print. She has translated many books on international contemporary art from German into English.
Comments on Gore’s work
Preti Taneja, Wasafiri Prize commendation: “Cloud Archive” is a piece of great beauty and style. Its fragments are perfectly composed, each sentence blurring the line between past and present, as a developing photograph comes into focus. Never becoming solipsistic, the writer allows us to think with the narrator about motherhood and childhood, parenthood and adulthood, translation and transmutation in nature and cities. Using precise language and weaving philosophy with poetry, the piece left the judges impressed, moved, and enlightened, and looking forward to reading more.
Christian Wiman: The chief risk in Sylee Gore’s work is silence: how much can you not say and still say everything? Her poems are so delicately made, and yet so densely lived. I felt like I was holding my breath through this whole sequence, and when I released it—when the language released me—the air of existence seemed clearer, truer, more transparently itself.
Marina Warner: Sylee Gore has carved a set of urgent votive tablets, elliptical variations on a calendar poem or books of days addressed to a child from birth to the arrival of language. The whole poem-in-prose sequence is suffused with a sense of wonder, disorientation, cultural loss (and gain). This is an innovatory and touching testament to the generational differences in finding a way to being at home.
Writing
Sylee Gore’s writing has been published in over 50 journals and anthologies based in Britain, China, Germany, Lebanon, Japan, and the United States, with her work translated into Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish.
Visit this page dedicated to Maximum Summer, her poetry book published in 2025.
Service
Sylee Gore is a critic for the Poetry Foundation and co-judged the Foundation’s 2025 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. She served as poetry editor at Oxford Review of Books and began contributing to the Oxford/Berlin Creative Collaborations in 2020. She has written book reviews for Harvard Review, Poetry London, and Words without Borders.
Artist Books
Twelve Centuries of Silence (Cutt Press)
These artist books were made by Sylee Gore and Erin Honeycutt, commissioned for Berlin exhibition and book launch of Silence: A Literary History by Professor Kate McLoughlin.
The six sets of artist books each contain a poster with the text Twelve Centuries of Silence, an A4 lotus book with 12 signatures, and an A3 lotus book with 12 signatures.
Intimate Infinity (Sampson Low)
Gore’s attention transforms the city into an intimate space. Her images reveal the pleasures to be unfurled from patient observation, capturing the serendipitous rewards available to the attuned eye. Featuring lyric essays by Dilek Güngör and Donna Stonecipher, Gore’s collection is both an experiment in seeing differently and an invitation to revel in evanescence.
Vast Orders of Light (Steel Incisors)
This fragmentary visual and linguistic idiom offers a subtle meditation on the communicative and ritualised forms that underwrite our social existence. Elements of abstract photography, collage, painting, and lyrical reflection imbue the objet trouvé with purposeful artistic form.
Contact
Represented by David Godwin Associates and Literarische Agentur Simon. For translation and editing commissions, visit Only Today.
Email sygore [at] gmail [dot] com