Vona Groarke

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Vona Groarke is an Irish poet. In September 2025 she became Ireland Professor of Poetry.

Contents

Biography

Groarke has published fifteen books, including nine collections of poetry with the Gallery Press: Shale (1994), Other People's Houses (1999), Flight (2002), Juniper Street (2006), Spindrift (2009), X (2014), Double Negative (2019), Link : Poet and World (2021), and Infinity Pool (2025). [1]

Groarke's translation of the eighteenth-century Irish poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire , titled Lament for Art O'Leary, was published by Gallery Books in 2008. [2] She has also written Woman of Winter (2023), a version of the ninth-century Irish poem usually known as 'The Lament of the Hag of Beare', with illustrations by Isabel Nolan.

In 2016 Groarke published two books: Selected Poems, which won the Piggott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection, and Four Sides Full, a book-length essay on art frames and much else.

In 2022, New York University Press published Groarke's Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara, an innovative, mixed-genre account of Irish woman immigrants in late nineteenth-century New York, and their lives and work as domestic servants. Using poetry, prose, history and images to tell its story, Hereafter arose out of Groarke's time as a Fellow of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, 2018–19.

Groarke is a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review (issues 113–120, with best-selling special issues on Seamus Heaney, W.B. Yeats and the Rising Generation of Irish poets). She has also been a selector for the Poetry Book Society in the UK; a judge of the Forward Prizes for Poetry, the Pollard Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award; and a poetry reviewer for The Irish Times . Her recent essays on poets and poetry have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books , The Poetry Review , P. N. Review , and Poetry Ireland Review .

Groarke has been a co-holder of the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University and has taught at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She has taught at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester since 2007. [3]

In 2010, Groarke was elected a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of the arts. [3] She is the current Poet in Residence with the Yeats Society in Sligo, [4] and Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge. [5] In 2025 she was appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry from September 2025 to November 2028. [6]

Awards and honours

Groarke's work has been recognized with awards including the Brendan Behan Memorial Award, [7] the Hennessy Award, [7] the Michael Hartnett Award, [3] and the Strokestown International Poetry Award. [7]

Her volumes Spindrift, X and Double Negative have all been nominated for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. [1] Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara was shortlisted for the Irish Independent / Yeats Society Poetry Prize 2023. Infinity Pool was shortlisted for the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize. [8]

Groarke was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024. [9]

Books

References

  1. 1 2 "Poetry award shortlist announced". The Irish Times. 30 January 2010. Retrieved 1 November 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 "Vona Groarke". University of Manchester . Retrieved 7 October 2025.
  3. "About Yeats Society Sligo". Yeats Society Sligo. Retrieved 7 October 2025.
  4. Short, Joe (1 November 2024). "St John's writer-in-residence Vona Groarke on Cambridge's 'vibrant literary culture'". Varsity . Retrieved 7 October 2025.
  5. "Vona Groarke announced as new Ireland Professor of Poetry". RTÉ Culture. 9 July 2024. Retrieved 9 July 2025.
  6. 1 2 3 "Publications: Vona Groarke". University of Manchester official website.
  7. "2025 – T. S. Eliot Prize". T. S. Eliot Prize. Retrieved 7 October 2025.
  8. "Groarke, Vona". Royal Society of Literature. 11 July 2024. Retrieved 5 July 2025.