Background

Mary O'Malley was born in 1954, in Connemara, County Galway, Ireland. She is the daughter of a fisherman.

Education

Mary graduated from University College, Galway.

Career

Mary O'Malley spent many years living in Portugal where she taught at Universidade Nova before returning to Ireland in the late 1980s and beginning a poetry career in 1990 with the title A Consideration of Silk from Galway-based publisher Salmon. She has since published six other books including a New and Selected. Her latest books have all been published by British house Carcanet.

She served on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the Cúirt International Poetry Festival for eight years. She was the author of its educational program. She taught on the Master of Arts programs for Writing and Education in the Arts at the National University of Ireland Galway for ten years, held the Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2013.

Mary has also has written for television and radio. She writes and broadcasts for RTÉ Radio regularly. She is a contributor to periodicals, including Fortnight, The Irish Times, Krino, Poetry Ireland, Salmon Magazine, and Sunday Tribune.

O'Malley is a popular reader of her own work and is frequently invited abroad to read or to teach. Her poems have been translated into several languages.

Achievements

• Mary O'Malley is a highly acclaimed poet as well as an author. She has won a number of awards for her poetry, including the Hennessey Award in 1990,13th annual Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award in 2009, and the 2016 Arts Council University of Limerick Writer's Fellowship. She is the Trinity Writer Fellow at the Oscar Wilde Centre for 2019.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Perfect V

    (Celebrated Irish poet Mary O’Malley's latest collection e...)

    2006
  • Valparaiso

    (A compilation of skillful poetry charting the journey of ...)

    2012
  • Consideration of Silk 1990
  • Where the Rocks Float 1993
  • Asylum Road 2001
  • The Boning Hall 2002

Views

O'Malley's early work reflected the struggles between modernity and tradition in Irish culture which prevailed at that time. At the vanguard of such struggles were women because many of the issues surrounding the establishment of modern society (such as divorce, contraception, and gay rights) were perceived by a political intelligentsia to affect women more than men. For generations most progressive individuals in Irish society emigrated, leaving a modernizing rump continuously outnumbered by an aging, conservative majority. As emigration slowed through the 1990s, the culture wars came to a head, and O'Malley's early work details the lives of those restricted in their personal and public freedoms, itching to break free while valuing some of the traditional aspects of the disappearing heritage.

Membership

Mary is a member of the Aosdána and Poetry Council for Ireland.

• 

  Aosdána , Ireland

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "O'Malley is a true artist in sketching the beautiful, small details without which the essence of a place, and the identity dependent on it, can be all too easily erased." - Eavan Boland

Connections

Mary is married and has two children.