Please join us to celebrate the launch of Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick, the Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2024.

Hosting the reading will be Elaine Feeney. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

The lives depicted by Victoria Kennefick alter, shatter and recombine in stunning monologues, innovative hybrid forms and piercing lyrics: her second book Egg/Shell is a diptych, a double album, which explores early motherhood and miscarriage, and the impact of a spouse’s gender transition and the dissolution of a marriage. Acclaimed as one of the boldest poetic voices to emerge in recent years, Kennefick, in the follow-up to her best-selling Eat or We Both Starve, breaks new ground with generosity, emotional complexity, formal ingenuity and wit.

About the speakers:

Victoria Kennefick grew up in Cork and lives in Kerry. Her debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. She was the UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer-in-Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-2024. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, New England Review, PN Review, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere.

Elaine Feeney writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. She has published three poetry collections including The Radio was Gospel & Rise. Her debut novel As You Were won Dalkey Book Festival’s Emerging Writer Prize, The Kate O’Brien Prize, Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Rathbones-Folio Prize. She featured widely on Best of 2020 lists and Feeney was chosen by The Observer as a top ten debut novelist. Feeney’s short fiction was published in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories and she has published widely including, The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Poetry Review and The Guardian. Feeney lectures in poetry and Creative Writing at The National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is a founding member of the Tuam Oral History Project. She also works on mentorship programmes and is interested in institutions and restorative justice, empathy in education, nationhood and working-class voices. Her second novel How to Build a Boat was published in 2023 (Harvill Secker) and a new poetry collection, All the Good Things You Deserve (Harvill Secker) is forthcoming in 2024.