INTERVIEWS
The Interviews
The Interview: Vona Groarke
An Award-winning Poet. Shortlisted for T.S Eliot Prize 2025
Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Vona Groarke, one of Ireland’s most acclaimed poets, known for her luminous precision of language and her exploration of the spaces poems make for themselves. Her ninth poetry collection and fifteenth book, Infinity Pool (Gallery Press, 2025), has been shortlisted for the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize.
Groarke has published fifteen books, and has received numerous awards, including the 2024 Michel Déon Award for Non-Fiction, for Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara. She is Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2025-28. Vona's Selected Poems (2016) won the Pigott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection,
The Interview: Alessandro Schiavetti
A Medieval Archeologist & Visionary Curator
Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Alessandro Schiavetti, medieval archaeologist turned visionary curator. He straddles centuries of creativity — from unearthing the echoes of the past to shaping the aesthetics of the present. As President and Curator of the ACS Art Center, Artistic Director of the #Raccontandoci Festival, and Director of the Municipal Exhibition Center of Cecina (CEC), Schiavetti brings to each project a rare blend of scholarship, imagination, and cultural empathy. His curatorial path — marked by collaborations with institutions like the Amedeo Modigliani Documentation Center and the Hermann Geiger Foundation — reflects an enduring quest to make art a living conversation between time, place, and people.
The Interview: Ben Markovits
An Award-winning writer. Shortlisted for Booker Prize 2025
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Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Benjamin Markovits, a British-American writer. He is the author of twelve novels, among them a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron. He was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta magazine in 2013. In 2016, his novel You Don't Have To Live Like This won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. In 2025, his novel The Rest of Our Lives has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin, and studied at Yale University and the University of Oxford. After college, he played professional basketball in Landshut, Germany, for a team in the southern league of the German second division. He now lives in London, where he teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
The Interview: Sam Dalrymple
A Historian & award-winning Film maker
Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Sam Dalrymple, a Delhi-raised Scottish historian and award-winning filmmaker. In 2018, he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 Partition of India. His debut film, Child of Empire, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, and received the inaugural XR History Award from the Körber-Stiftung Foundation. His animated series Lost Migrations sold out at the BFI the same year.
Sam is a columnist for Architectural Digest, and in 2025, Travel & Leisure named him ‘Champion of the Travel Narrative’. He runs the history Substack @travelsofsamwise. His recently released best-selling book, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, has been making waves and was shortlisted for the 2025 Eastern Eye Award for History.