Join us for a reading and discussion with the Trinity Arts Council Writer in Residence, poet Victoria Kennefick. Victoria will read from her acclaimed collections, Eat or We Both Starve and Egg/Shell. The reading will be followed by a discussion with Seán Hewitt (School of English) and audience Q&A.
Victoria Kennefick is a poet, writer and teacher from Shanagarry, Co. Cork now based in Co. Kerry. Her first collection, Eat or We Both Starve, was published by Carcanet Press in March 2021. It won the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection 2022 and The Dalkey Literary Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award 2022. It was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Costa Poetry Book Award, The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and The Butler Literary Prize. 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. Her second collection is Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024).
Seán Hewitt’s debut poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, received the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for many awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. All Down Darkness Wide, his memoir, was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards and for the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and he has collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. His second collection of poetry is Rapture’s Road. Hewitt lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2022, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Open, Heaven (2025), his first novel, is out in 2025.
Books will be for sale, courtesy of Hodges Figgis.
