Victoria Kennefick

Dr Victoria Kennefick’s 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, and the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024), was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2024 and won the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025. She was an Arts Council of Ireland/UCD Writer in Residence and Poet in Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo in 2023. In 2024, she was Cork County Council Arts Office Writer in Residence. Last year, she was appointed as the Arts Council of Ireland/Trinity College Dublin Writer Fellow and a Poet in Residence at the Queensland Writers Centre, Brisbane. She is a 2026 ROOTS Artist in Residence in Siamsa Tíre.

Victoria’s attendance at this year’s festival is supported by the Irish Writers Centre.