Mary O’Malley was born on the West coast of Ireland, where she now lives. She is the author of six poetry collections – A Consideration of Silk (Salmon, 1990); Where the Rocks Float (Salmon, 1993); The Knife in the Wave (Salmon, 1997); Asylum Road (Salmon, 2001); A Perfect V (Carcanet, 2006), Valparaiso (Carcanet, 2012) – and the latest, Playing the Octopus, shall be published in July 2016. Her poems have been translated into several languages and received numerous literary awards. She was involved in setting up the Women’s Studies Centre in University College Galway and has written extensively on the need to include the voices of women writers in the Irish literary canon.
