The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust 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.

From September 2025 to November 2027 Vona Groarke will begin her role as the tenth Ireland Professor of Poetry.

Vona Groarke has published fifteen books and has been described in Poetry Ireland Review as ‘one of the best writers in Ireland today’. Her ninth poetry collection, Infinity Pool, was published in May 2025 by The Gallery Press, and includes poems previously published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Poetry (Chicago), The Poetry Review, Poetry London and The TLS. 

In 2022, New York University Press published Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara – a poetic account of a young Irish woman emigrant to New York in the late nineteenth century. This arose out of Groarke’s time as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library 2018-19. Of it, The Spectator predicted: ‘Groarke’s lyrical act of historical investigation will surely become a classic of Irish literature’. Hereafter won the 2024 Michel Déon Award and was cited by the judges as a ‘truly powerful, enchanting and singular’ work.

Groarke is also an accomplished essayist. In 2016 an Irish Times reviewer found her book-length essay, Four Sides Full, ‘as moving as it is erudite and elegant’ and, in the same year, her Selected Poems was deemed ‘a collection of almost sublime purity’ by The Dublin Review of Books. Groarke’s Selected Poems was awarded the 2017 Piggott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection. Her version of Eibhlín Dubh Ni Chonaill’s Lament for Art O’Leary was re-published to accompany Irene Buckley’s opera based on the text, which premiered in Dublin’s National Concert Hall in March 2025.

She was the 2017 recipient of the Irish Literary Hall of Fame Award, and is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Academy of the Arts, and of the Royal Literary Society. A poetry reviewer for The Irish Times and Curator of PoetryFest at the Irish Arts Center in New York, she has taught poetry at the University of Manchester since 2007 and is the current Writer in Residence at St. John’s College, Cambridge.