Victoria Kennefick is a poet, writer and teacher from Shanagarry, Co. Cork now based in Co. Kerry. She 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 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, Poetry News, Prelude, Copper Nickel, The Irish Times, Ambit, Banshee and elsewhere. She won the 2013 Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize. She was a recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her debut collection, Eat Or We Both Starve, was published by Carcanet Press in 2021 and 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. 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.
Shortlisted Works
Related News Stories
Judges Glyn Maxwell (Chair), Caroline Bird and Zaffar Kunial have chosen the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021 Shortlist from a record 177 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers. The Shortlist consists of an eclectic mixture of established poets, none of whom has previously won the Prize, and...
