Collection: Mary Dorcey

The award winning short story writer, poet and novelist, Mary Dorcey was born in County Dublin, Ireland. In 1990 she won the Rooney Prize for Literature for her short story collection A Noise from the Woodshed. Her best selling novel Biography of Desire (Poolbeg) was published in September of 1997 to critical acclaim and reprinted three months later, and is now about to go into its third reprint. In 1990 she published a novella, 'Scarlet O'Hara', contained in the anthology In and Out of Time (Onlywomen Press). She has published four volumes of poetry: Kindling (Only Women Press, 1982), Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers (Salmon Poetry, 1991), The River That Carries Me (Salmon Poetry, 1995), and Like Joy In Season, Like Sorrow (Salmon, 2001). She has been awarded three Art Council Bursaries for literature, in 1990 and 1995 and 1999. Her work is now taught on Irish Studies and Women's Studies courses in universities internationally. Several theses have been published on her work and numerous critical essays. Her stories and poems have been anthologized in more than one hundred collections. Her poetry was taught on both the Irish Junior Certificate English course and on the British O Level English curriculum. It has been performed on radio and television (R.T.E. and Channel 4.) It has also been dramatized for stage productions in Ireland, Britain and Australia in In the Pink (The Raving Beauties) and Sunny Side Plucked. For over fifteen years she has given talks and readings of her work at major art festivals and at universities and book shops throughout Ireland, Britain and Europe, and the United States. She has lived in The United States, England, France, Spain and Japan. She is at present a Research Associate at Trinity College Dublin. She is writer in residence at the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies where she gives seminars in contemporary English literature and leads a creative writing workshop.