Mary O' Malley

Poet, Member of Aosdána, Ireland

Mary O'Malley is an award-winning poet and member of Aosdána. She lectures on the MA in Drama and the Arts in Education at NUI, Galway and is also the current Writer-in-Residence at NUI, Galway.

Biography

Mary O'Malley is basing her residency around a programme on civic space in Galway which she has called ‘What goes round comes around'. Through her residency she has facilitated public participation in a series of readings, talks and workshops given by a range of speakers, including a visual artist, a climber/environmentalist specialising in threatened wildernesses and their languages, a philosophy graduate versed in the writings of Gaston Bachelard and a social geographer.

Mary's poetry collections include: ‘A Consideration of Silk', Salmon Publishing, 1990, ‘Where the Rocks Float', Salmon/ Poolbeg, 1993, ‘The Knife in the Wave', Salmon Publishing, 1997, ‘Asylum Road', Salmon Publishing, 2001,'The Boning Hall: New and Selected Poems', Carcanet, October 2002, ‘Three Poets: An Anthology' with Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan, Carcanet Press, 2004, ‘A Perfect V', Carcanet Press 2006.

Mary's work has been published in a wide range of literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including, Krino, Poetry Ireland, The Seneca Review, Atlanta Review, Da Braake Honde, Lictungen, The Lifelines Anthology and the Review of Irish American Studies. She has also translated poetry from Irish into English and translated poems by the Mexican poet, Pura Lopes Colome, into English.

She has been Writer-in-Assocation with Music for Galway and Writer-in-Residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, in Paris and the Verbal Arts Centre in Derry. Mary has also worked in community-based settings, providing creative-writing workshops, including workshops in the Irish language, in Inis Mór on the Aran Islands, at Clifden Community Arts Week and at Leitir Fraic Environmental Centre. She has also taught in Castlerea Prison.

Mary has done a wide variety of work for radio and television. She was commissioned by RTE, the Irish national television channel, to write a series of poems for a television documentary on the Irish sean-nós singer, Joe Heaney. She made and presented a series of 6 programmes on the subject of the spirit of landscape, entitled ‘The Spirit Level' for RTE I Radio, in 2002. She has contributed to the RTE radio series ‘The Blackbird and the Bell' and to ‘Sunday Miscellany' and ‘Lyric Notes'. In addition, a radio documentary about her work with the Writer's Group in Inis Mór, entitled ‘To the Island', was made by Lorelei Harris for RTE 1 Radio.