Alice Kinsella.
Alice Kinsella's books include Milk: on motherhood and madness(Picador, 2023), Wake of the Whale(Mayo Books, 2024) which was a Sunday Independent Book of the Year, and The Ethics of Cats(Broken Sleep, 2025).
Her work spans poetry, prose, performance, and hybrid texts utilising narrative and both archival and field research.
Dedicated to climate conscious art, Alice co-edited Empty House: poetry and prose on the climate crisis (Doire Press, 2021); she also writes about the mammalian experience and creating through emergency on her substack Creation in Crisis.
An award-winning writer, Alice grew up in Co. Mayo and moved to Dublin to study English and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, before returning west where she obtained a Masters in Writing from the University of Galway. Her work has been translated into Polish, Arabic, and Greek, and her poetry films have been screened in Australia, Greece, USA, and Iraq. An experienced speaker and guest at literary festivals, she has also received residencies/bursaries from Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Cill Rialaig, Art in the Landscape Festival, among others.
Outside of her own creative work, she works as an editor, creative writing teacher, and mentor. She runs All Weather Words creative workshops and retreats, and is the literary editor at Mayo Books Press.
She’s an Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Artist, and lives in Co. Mayo.
Alice is represented by Marianne Gunn O’Connor.
Artist Statement
As an artist and educator I am preoccupied with the perception of history. History is not recorded by the colonised, but by the coloniser. Who writes history, who writes our reality, is something I continuously explore. Accessing our own voices can be a political act. To read is to engage in conversation, to listen. I am dedicated to compiling work that is conscious of the voices of the colonised, the local, the historically neglected.
My themes and subjects of interest include shame, climate anxiety, parenting through emergency, the biodiversity crisis, madness and postcolonialism, Ireland’s history of institutions, and matrescence.
My body of work to date includes poetry, narrative non-fiction, docu-poetry including images and collage, poetry, theatre hybrid performances. I turn, frequently to archives, research trips, and the natural world for inspiration. The hybridity of my work reflects my interest in ambiguity, in questioning and restructuring as a way of being human. I blend documentary with narrative non-fiction and poetry, approaching each subject with an awareness of my own ignorance, leaving room to bring the reader along with me.
With all of my work, I am always asking two questions: