Egg/Shell

Victoria Kennefick grew up in Cork and lives in Kerry. Her debut 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. She was the UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer in Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-2024. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, New England Review, PN Review, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere.

'Visceral poems about motherhood are two-a-penny right now. But Kennefick's work doesn't end with an easy applause line, or theinvitation to a sisterly high-five... This collection dives into uncomfortable exposure and the reality of raising children. With her partner's gender transition described later in the book, the theme of vulnerability becomes almost unbearably poignant. This is red meat served not just rare but still moving.'Graeme Richardson, The Times