Kerry Hardie

Kerry Hardie (Ireland) read the 2019 John Hewitt Society International Summer School in Armagh, alongside Sarah Clancy. Previously, she read with Dennis O’Driscoll and Frank Ormsby for the 2011 John Hewitt Birthday Reading, and with Glenn Patterson for a John Hewitt Society event at the 2011 Banbridge Arts Festival. 

Kerry is a poet and novelist. She grew up in Co. Down and lives in Co. Kilkenny with her husband, the writer Seán Hardie. She has won the Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry, the National Poetry Prize (Ireland), the Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Award, the James Joyce Suspended Sentence Award (Australia) and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. 

Kerry Hardie is a member of Aosdána.

She has six collections with Gallery Press: A Furious Place (1996), Cry for the Hot Belly (2000), The Sky Didn’t Fall (2003), The Silence Came Close (2006), Only This Room (2009) and The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree (2012). Her Selected Poems (2011) was published by Gallery Press in Ireland and by Bloodaxe Books in Britain. 

Kerry’s seventh collection, The Zebra Stood in the Night (2014, Bloodaxe), was shortlisted for the Irish Times–Poetry Now Award. Her eighth collection, Where Now Begins, is published by Bloodaxe in 2020.

Her first novel, Hannie Bennet’s Winter Marriage (Harper Collins) appeared in 2000; her second, The Bird Woman (Little, Brown and Co.) was published in 2006.