Belfast Invites: Mícheál McCann & Victoria Kennefick

Belfast Invites: a mini-series in which Belfast-based writers are asked who they’d like to be in conversation with. 

For this instalment we are delighted to welcome Mícheál McCann and Victoria Kennefick to discuss their poetic inspirations, the impact of place on their writing and their careers. 

Mícheál McCann is from Derry City. His poems have appeared in Banshee, The Stinging Fly, The Poetry Review and Poetry Ireland Review, anthologized in Queering the Green (Lifeboat Press, 2021) and Romance Options (Dedalus Press, 2023) and have been broadcast on RTÉ and BBC. His first collection, Devotion, is forthcoming with The Gallery Press in 2024.

Victoria Kennefick grew up in Cork and lives in Kerry. Her debut 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. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. She was the UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer-in-Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-2024. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, New England Review, PN Review, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere.