Kerry Hardie was born in 1951 and grew up in County Down. She now lives in County Kilkenny with her husband, the writer and artist Seán Hardie. Her poems have won many prizes, including 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. Her poems have featured in The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (2010) and The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry (2011) as well as in ten Bloodaxe anthologies:Staying Alive, Being Alive, Being Human, Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy, Staying Human, Soul Feast, In Person: World Poets, The Poetry Cure, The New Irish Poets and Modern Women Poets.
She published 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. Her seventh collection, The Zebra Stood in the Night, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2014 and shortlisted for the Irish Times–Poetry Now Award, and followed by Where Now Begins, in 2020. Her ninth collection, We Go On, was published by Bloodaxe in 2024.
Her first novel, Hannie Bennet’s Winter Marriage appeared in 2000; her second, The Bird Woman was published in 2006. Kerry Hardie is a member of Aosdána.
Author photo: Seán Hardie
