EMERGING WRITER AWARD 2022 WINNER

The Emerging Writer Award 2022 winner was announced during this year’s Dalkey Book Festival live event.

The winners of this year’s Dalkey Literary Awards presented by Zurich have been announced at the Dalkey Book Festival, in conjunction with Zurich Insurance plc. 

Despite a diverse range of titles and genres vying for the Emerging Writer award, the judges agreed that Victoria Kennefick is a worthy winner for her book Eat Or We Both Starve. 

This is the third year of the Dalkey Literary Awards, and with a total prize fund of €30,000, they are the biggest prize value awards solely for Irish writers.  As well as the prestige of winning the award, Victoria Kennefick will receive €10,000.

The Judging Panel for the Emerging Writer Award were Madeleine Keane, Martina Devlin and Hugh Linehan.

Commenting on Eat Or We Both Starve, the judges said: “This is a slim volume with an impact that's heavy-hitting. It delivers everything one looks for in a piece of writing: emotional heft, story, nuance, hope, memorability; and because it's also quirky, it has the element of surprise. Victoria Kennefick is a poet who can hold her own on the international stage.”

Eat Or We Both Starve is the highly anticipated debut collection from award-winning Irish poet Victoria Kennefick. The poems in this collection explore the sense of powerlessness a young woman feels growing from childhood to adulthood in a predominantly Irish Catholic society.