Mary O'Malley – författare

This highly successful comedy is a sharply critical exposition of a Catholic girlhood in a London convent school in the late 1950s, with its potent admixture of sex and religion.

Imagine for a moment that you had no pressures in your life—no problems to fix, no deadlines to meet, no struggles to overcome. Do you feel that sense of spacious relief? It’s not an illusion, teaches Mary O’Malley. It really is possible to live with that profound openness all the time, even while tending to your everyday tasks and obligations. In What’s in the Way Is the Way, Mary offers practical guidance for meeting all of your experience with an abiding sense of ease, trust, and peace of mind.This accessible book is divided into ten phases, featuring inspiring wisdom and step-by-step exercises to heal the core beliefs that keep you stuck. With each chapter, Mary invites you to come into the present and see yourself and your circumstances in a different way—unclouded by preconceptions, struggle, or fear. Join her on this illuminating journey to discover:• How fear controls our lives—untangling the conditioning that keeps us from trusting our complete experience• The healing power of curiosity—a natural way to meet our lives without needing to change or judge anything• Trusting what happens even when we feel threatened, ashamed, or afraid• Why we become more active, engaged, and effective when we stop "doing" life and start being fully present for our lives• Remembering exercises—simple, powerful practices for reconnecting with our natural state of curiosity, trust and love"No object, person, or experience will ever bring you the deep and lasting peace that comes from simply being open to life," writes Mary. With What’s in the Way Is the Way, this renowned teacher brings you a powerful guide for turning your obstacles into your greatest allies and teachers—and showing up for your life with all your vulnerability, passion, and magnificent perfection.

Winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2025Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2025Shortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025The poems of The Shark Nursery respond to a disturbed world. The experience of lockdown, of lives lived in an online reality, and of the animal world are the interlocking parts of the poems' world. The animal poems draw on the tradition of animals in Irish poetry and myth. From the wolf's touch to the rat's tweet, animals and fish refuse the roles human beings impose on them. O'Malley's animals find new language in the face of contemporary perils.In fusing mythic with modern elements, The Shark Nursery is marked by rigorous attention to language and tone. Its poems weave between human, animal and metaphysical realms. In a space before noise begins, tigers visit cities and a white leopard sits on a lawn in Suburbia. In the strange, sealed off world portrayed in the 'The Ballad of Googletown' – an eerie, genuine ballad, where the familiar tropes and refrains of ballad are hung out to dry – lives are lived online and social interaction is unnecessary:The cars are in the driveAnd the bees are in the hiveThey say the kids are safe insideIn GoogletownThis new book promises, as Joseph O'Connor has written, all those things 'we go to Mary O'Malley for: truthfulness, seriousness, playfulness, too, and then a particular sort of hesitating and hard-won wisdom, a pushback against nonsense or sentiment or fakery, the beauty of plain words placed in careful order, carefully – and always, the bliss of musicality.'

Mapping the changes that have occurred in Irish literature over the past fifty years, this volume includes twenty-one writers, poets, and playwrights from the North and South of Ireland, who tell their own stories. They are funny, tragic, angry, philosophical, but all are vivid personal accounts of their experiences as women writing during a pivotal period in the history of Ireland. With a foreword by Martina Devlin, and an introduction by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, the anthology includes essays by Cherry Smyth, Mary Morrissy, Lia Mills, Moya Cannon, Aine Ní Ghlinn, Catherine Dunne, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Mary O’Donnell, Mary O’Malley, Ruth Carr, Evelyn Conlon, Anne Devlin, Ivy Bannister, Sophia Hillan, Medbh McGuckian, Mary Dorcey, Celia de Fréine, Máiríde Woods, Liz McManus, Mary Rose Callaghan, and Phyl Herbert.