‘A collection of almost sublime purity’ is how the Dublin Review of Books described Vona Groake’s Selected Poems, a book which surveyed her first two-and-a-half decades of published work. Her most recent book is Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara, an innovative blend of poetry, fiction and history that reflects on the life of an emigrant Irish woman in the latter part of the nineteenth-century. Colm Tóibín described the new book as ‘a groundbreaking way of investigating a traumatic period in history, not only Irish history, but American history too.’
At once intellectual and accessible, moving and experimental, and combining a linguistic innovation with a deep emotional rooting, RENDANG (2020), the first collection by London-based poet Will Harris, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His second book of poems, Brother Poem, was published by Granta in the UK and by Wesleyan in the US in March 2023.
Rachael Allen’s highly-anticipated debut collection, Kingdomland, was published by Faber and Faber in 2019 and marked the arrival of a significant new voice in British poetry. Lauding Kingdomland in the Sunday Times, Jeremy Noel-Tod wrote that you mustn’t ‘be fooled by this book’s bright orange jacket: it’s not cheerful, it’s on fire’.
Since her first collection, Shale (1994), Vona Groarke has published twelve books with The Gallery Press, including eight poetry books (of which the most recent is Link: Poet and World, in 2021). Selected Poems was awarded the 2017 Piggott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection and, in that year also, she was inducted into the Irish Literary Hall of Fame. Her translation of Eibhlín Dubh Ni Chonaill’s Lament for Art O’Leary was re-published in 2020 to accompany an opera by Irene Buckley. In 2022, New York University Press published Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara – an account of Irish women domestic servants in 1890s New York, which arose out of her time as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, 2018-19. Writer, critic, editor and essayist, she has taught at the University of Manchester since 2007, and is the current Writer in Residence at St. John’s College, Cambridge University.
Will Harris is a London-based writer. His debut poetry book RENDANG (2020) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He co-facilitates the Southbank New Poets Collective and works in Extra Care homes. In 2022, his co-translation (with Delaina Haslam) of Habib Tengour’s Consolatio was published. His second book of poems, Brother Poem, was published by Granta in the UK and by Wesleyan in the US in March 2023.
Rachael Allen is the author of Kingdomland (Faber) and co-author of numerous artists’ books, including Nights of Poor Sleep (Prototype), Almost One, Say Again! (Slimvolume), Green at an Angle (Kestle Barton) and Material (Loose Joints). She teaches Creative Writing at Queen Mary University, is the poetry editor for Granta Books, and her second collection of poems, God Complex, is forthcoming in 2024.
