Victoria Kennefick wins Farmgate Café National Poetry Award

With sponsorship from one of Cork’s most loved restaurants, the Farmgate Café, this award is €2000 for the best full-length poetry collection in English published in 2024 by a poet residing in Ireland. Judges this year were were Dean Browne, Mary O’Donnell and Maurice Riordan. Limited places are available for a cosy reception at the Farmgate where the winning poet, Victoria Kennefick, will receive her prize and present a short reading on May 13th.

Tickets for this reading, the opening event of the Cork International Poetry Festival, are free but booking is required.

Farmgate Café National Poetry Award winner

Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick (Carcanet Press)

Victoria Kennefick is a writer, poet, editor and teacher. She completed a PhD in English Literature at University College Cork and was a Fulbright Scholar at Emory University and Georgia College and State University. Her debut poetry 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. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2024, BBC Poetry Extra Book of the Month for March as well as a Book of the Year in The Telegraph, The Sunday Independent and The Poetry Society UK.

In a year where a debut collection does not win the overall Farmgate Café National Poetry Award, the highest scoring debut collection in the competition is awarded the separate Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award. This award is for €1000. This year there is a tie between — and — who will share the prize.

Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award co-winners

In Spring We Turned to Water by Michael Dooley (Doire Press)

Michael Dooley’s poems have appeared in Banshee, the Irish Independent, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and have been broadcast on RTÉ Radio One. His debut collection, In Spring We Turned to Water, is published by Doire Press.

High Jump as Icarus Story by Gustav Parker Hibbett (Banshee Press)

Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout. Their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press), was shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2025 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. They are the 2025 Commissioned Writer for Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, and they are currently pursuing a PhD in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin, where they are an Early Career Research Fellow at the Long Room Hub. 

Shortlist

The shortlist in alphabetical order: What Remains the Same by Alvy Carragher (The Gallery Press), The Following Year by Patrick Chapman (Salmon Poetry), In Spring We Turned to Water by Michael Dooley (Doire Press), High Jump as Icarus Story by Gustav Parker Hibbett (Banshee Press), Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick (Carcanet Press), The Shark Nursery by Mary O’Malley (Carcanet Press), Harmony (Unfinished) by Grace Wilentz (The Gallery Press).