Dr Victoria Kennefick

Dr Victoria Kennefick is a writer, poet, editor and teacher. She completed a PhD in English Literature at University College Cork and was a Fulbright Scholar at Emory University and Georgia College and State University. 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 debut poetry collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the Butler Literary Prize. It was a Book of the Year in The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Sunday Independent and The White Review, and was also selected as one of The Telegraph's Best Poetry Books to Buy 2021. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2024, BBC Poetry Extra Book of the Month for March as well as a Book of the Year in The Telegraph, The Sunday Independent and The Poetry Society UK. In 2023 she was an Arts Council of Ireland/UCD Writer in Residence as well as Poet in Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo. In 2024, she was Cork County Council Arts Office Writer in Residence. For 2025, she is delighted to be appointed as the Arts Council of Ireland/Trinity College Dublin Writer Fellow.