You are warmly invited to a poetry reading on Wed May 7th @ 630 Vona Groarke and Jamie McKendrick will read from their recent collections in in the Old Library, Pembroke college. Wine Reception to follow. Please join us for what promises to be a wonderful evening of poetry !
Vona Groarke has been described in Poetry Ireland Review as ‘among the best Irish poets writing today’. She is the author of fourteen books, including eight poetry collections with The Gallery Press (most recently Woman of Winter, 2023, and Link: Poet and World, 2021). Her Selected Poems won the 2017 Pigott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection. Her ninth collection, Infinity Pool, will be published in May 2025. A Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library 2018-19, her research there led to Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara, a multi-genre account of the lives of Irish women domestic servants in late nineteenth century New York, (New York University Press, 2022). Hereafter was a Book of the Year in the Irish Times, the Spectator and Sunday Independent, and won the RIA’s 2024 Michel Déon Award. Poet, essayist, reviewer and editor, her work has recently appeared in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, L.A. Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and Poetry Review. She teaches at the University of Manchester and is the current Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge.
Jamie McKendrick is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Prize and a Poetry Book Society Choice; Ink Stone (2003), shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Crocodiles & Obelisks (2007), shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Out There (2012) won the Hawthornden Prize.
His most recent collection is Drypoint (2018). He has published two Selected Poems with Faber and is editor of 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004). The Embrace (2009), his translations of Valerio Magrelli’s poetry, won the Oxford-Weidenfeld and the John Florio prizes, and his translations of Antonella Anedda’s poems, Archipelago (2014), also won the John Florio prize. His Selected Poems was published in 2016. His translation of Giorgio Bassani’s masterwork The Novel of Ferrara was published by Penguin and by Norton in 2018. His self-illustrated chapbook The Years (Arc) was published in 2020 and won the Michael Marks Illustration Award. A collection of his essays on poetry, art and translation The Foreign Connection (Legenda) was also published that year.
