Vona Groarke and Bernard O’Donoghue

Bernard O’Donoghue grew up in Cullen, Co Cork, and still spends part of the year there. Since 1965 he has lived in Oxford, where he taught Medieval English literature and Irish poetry at Wadham College. Bernard has published eight volumes of poems, the most recent being The Seasons of Cullen Church (Faber 2016). He is working on an edition of the Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney.

Vona Groarke has published twelve books with The Gallery Press, including eight poetry collections, the latest being Link: Poet and World (2021). Her Selected Poems won the 2017 Pigott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection. Later this year, New York University Press will publish Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara – an account of Irish women domestic servants in 1890s New York. She has taught at the University of Manchester since 2007. She will become Poet in Residence at St. John’s College of Cambridge University this year. Otherwise, she lives in South County Sligo, where she reads and writes.