Vona Groarke was born in Edgeworthstown in the Irish midlands and raised in Ireland. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and University College, Cork.
Groarke has published fourteen books, including eight full-length poetry collections, as well as several pamphlets and artist’s books. She publishes with The Gallery Press in Ireland and Wake Forest University Press in the United States. Her notable works include her first collection, Shale (1994), winner of the Brendan Behan Memorial Prize; Flight (2002), which won the Michael Hartnett Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection; Spindrift (2009) and X (2014), both recommended by the Poetry Book Society; and Double Negative (2019), which was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Her Selected Poems (2016) won the Pigott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection. Most recently, she published Woman of Winter (2023), a version of the 9th-century Irish poem “Lament for the Hag of Beare” with illustrations by Isabel Nolan, and Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara (NYU Press, 2022), a mixed-genre work that incorporates poetry, prose, and archival records to investigate the life of Groarke’s emigrant great-grandmother.
Groarke is the recipient of the Hennessy Award, the Strokestown International Poetry Award, the Stand Magazine Poetry Prize, and the Hennessy Hall of Fame Award for outstanding contribution to literature. She has been editor of Poetry Ireland Review, selector for the Poetry Book Society, and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. Groarke has taught in the United States at Villanova University, where she was co-holder of the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies, and Wake Forest University. She was Writer in Residence at St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, for 2022–2023.
A member of Aosdána, Groarke is widely regarded as one of the major Irish poets working today. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Poetry at the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University and Poet in Residence at the Yeats Society in Sligo. Her primary residence is in Tubbercurry, County Sligo.
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More Vona Groarke
Audio/Text: Groarke reads four poems for Poetry Archive
Text: Read five poems by Groarke at Poetry International
Video: Groarke reads from Double Negative for the John Hewitt Society
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Photo by Matthew Thompson.