Ireland Professor of Poetry, Vona Groarke begins her three-year tenure (2025–2028) in residence at Trinity College Dublin for the Spring Semester, commencing at the end of January 2026.

As part of the series, Vona Groarke will deliver a public lecture entitled ‘A Lonely Began: The Poem Alone and the Poem in Company’, speaking first in Dublin in February and in Belfast in March 2026. 

This lecture will “look at the relationship between poets, poems and loneliness. Often perceived as a solitary figure, sometimes embracing and sometimes resisting that aloneness, poets seem magnetically drawn to the subject of loneliness. This lecture will think about how poets write about it, and have their poems acknowledge, embody or defy that intrinsic loneliness.”

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About the Ireland Chair of Poetry

The Ireland Chair of Poetry was set up in 1998 following the award of the Nobel Prize of Literature to Seamus Heaney and is jointly held between Queen’s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Every three years a poet of honour and distinction is chosen to represent the Chair as Ireland’s Professor of Poetry. During their tenure the holder spends a year attached to each of the three universities and resides for a period of approximately eight weeks at each. While in residence, the poet gives informal workshops or readings, spends time working with students and performing outreach work and makes one formal presentation a year, usually in the form of a lecture.

Image credit: Joe Shaughnessy