Please join us to celebrate the launch of Eat or We Both Starve, the debut collection by Victoria Kennefick. Hosting the reading will be Carcanet poet and Irish Times critic Martina Evans, joining Victoria to discuss the new edition. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will also be showing extracts of the text during the reading so that you can read along.

Victoria Kennefick’s daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces – the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire – but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past – and not to be consumed by it.

Rebecca Goss writes: ‘Victoria Kennefick writes with a fresh urgency, giving us poems that are honest and fearless. She once said: “Poetry has saved my life, made my life. Reading and writing it have taught me bravery and discipline.” Kennefick is unafraid to explore bereavement, sex and the female body in her poetry. She writes with a visceral originality. Her poems are rich with physical sensations. She is able to find beauty in the big subjects like sorrow and desire, offering us the finest, most startling details. Her identity as a young Irish woman is hugely important to her, something she explores with intelligence and candour. I have always felt there is nothing Victoria could not tackle. The scope in her work is exhilarating.’

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.