Dromineer Nenagh Literary Festival promises an evening of poetry, fiction and memoir

On Friday, October 6 Vona Groarke and Kit de Waal will be discussing their work at DNLF.

Both women have written about their own lives throughout their writing in poetry and fiction, and they’ve both also written memoir.

Vona Groarke was born un Edgeworthstown, county Longford.

Her thirteenth book, Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara – a poetic account of Irish women domestic servants in 1890s New York including her ancestor Ellen O’Hara.

The book grew out of her time as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library 2018-19 and was published in Nov 2022 by New York University Press.

John Banville has written that “Hereafter would be heartbreaking if it weren't so beautiful. As it is, it lifts the heart.” Of her eight poetry collections, the most recent is Link: Poet and World (Gallery Press, 2121).

Her Selected Poems won the 2017 Pigott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection.

Poet, essayist, reviewer and editor, her work has recently appeared in New York Review of Books, L.A. Review of Books, P.N. Review and Poetry Review.

She is the current Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge. Woman of Winter, a contemporary re-telling of the ninth century Irish poem, The Hag of Beare will be published, with drawings by Isobel Nolan, in August 2023.

Kit de Waal was born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father and brought up among the Irish community of Birmingham in the 60s and 70s.

De Waal’s mother, Sheila Doyle, was born in Birmingham to a large family of Irish immigrants from Wexford. De Vaal has said that “they lived in an Irish community, so every single person you walked past in the street had Irish accents.”

Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017.

In 2022, it was adapted for television by the BBC. Her second novel, The Trick to Time, was longlisted for the Women's Prize and her young adult novel Becoming Dinah was shortlisted for the Carnegie CLIP Award 2020.

A collection of short stories, Supporting Cast was published in 2020. An anthology of working-class memoir, Common People was crowdfunded and edited by Kit in 2019.

Kit founded her own TV production company, Portopia Productions and the Big Book Weekend, a free digital literary festival in 2020 and was named the FutureBook Person of the Year 2019.

She is a patron of Prisoners Abroad, ambassador of Well-being in the Arts and a trustee of The Reading Agency.

Kit is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor and Writer in Residence at Leicester University.

Her memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes was published in August 2022.

Both writers will be in conversation with Paula Shields of RTE Radio1’s ARENA. For booking se www.dnlf.ie