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Victoria Kennefick in conversation with Dr Catherine Gander and Dr Karl O’Hanlon. With her recent debut book, Eat or We Both Starve, Victoria Kennefick is a bright new star in Irish poetry. Victoria will read from and discuss her visceral, startling and beautiful work.
Victoria Kennefick's first collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet) was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Book 2021. It was a book of the year in Irish Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Independent and The White Review and was also selected as one of The Telegraph's Best Poetry Books to Buy 2021.
Her pamphlet, White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015), won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition and the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry News, Prelude, Copper Nickel, The Irish Times, Ambit, bath magg, Banshee, Bad Lilies, PBLJ and elsewhere.
Victoria is the Yeats Society Poet in Residence for 2022 - 2024.
Victoria won the 2013 Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize and many of her poems have also been anthologised and broadcast on national radio stations. A recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, she has received bursaries from Kerry County Council and Words Ireland. She was a co-host of the Unlaunched Books Podcast and is on the committee of Listowel Writers’ Week, Ireland’s longest-running literary festival. She is a mentor for WORDS Ireland and teaches at The Poetry School and the Arvon foundation. Victoria holds a doctorate in English from University College Cork and studied at Emory University and Georgia College and State University as part of a Fulbright Scholarship. Her research on the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and Frank O’Connor was also funded by an IRCHSS Scholarship and a MARBL Fellowship.
Maynooth University Arts and Minds Festival is supported by Kildare County Council and funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media’s Local Live Performance Programming Scheme.
