Vona Groarke was born in the Irish Midlands in 1964. She attended Trinity College, Dublin and University College, Cork. She has lived in Dublin, Cork, and Dundalk and has been writer-in-residence at universities in Galway and Maynooth and was co-holder of the Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies at Villanova University (2004). A member of Aosdána she was selected as a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library 2018/19 and currently teaches in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Her collections published by The Gallery Press include Shale (1994), Other People’s Houses (1999), Flight (2002, shortlisted for the Forward Prize [UK] and winner of the Michael Hartnett Award in 2003), Juniper Street (2006), Spindrift (2009), X (2014), both Poetry Book Society Recommendations, Selected Poems (2016), and Four Sides Full (2016, a book-length personal essay). Double Negative (shortlisted for the 2020 Irish Times Poetry Now Award) was published in 2019.