26 April,
Panel / Poetry /
Poetry Reading: Mary O’Malley, Liam Carson, Paul Perry
Sunday, 26 April 2026, 4:00pm
The Mick Lally Theatre / €10/12
Book NowJoin us for an afternoon of poetry with Mary O’Malley, Liam Carson and Paul Perry.
Mary O’Malley’s The Shark Nursery won the Walcott Prize in 2025. This collection explores a world shaped by lockdowns, online realities, and the animal kingdom. Drawing on Irish myth and contemporary concerns, the poems blur the lines between human, animal, and metaphysical realms, using language to confront modern perils. The collection also fuses mythic with modern elements, as in the eerie, online-driven world of ‘The Ballad of Googletown.’ We welcome Mary’s return to Cúirt after a long-term involvement with the festival.
Liam Carson’s Belfast Twilight is a collection of haikai that create kaleidoscopic montages, taking the reader into various worlds. From Belfast’s Docklands at twilight to windswept islands off the west of Ireland, to life in 1980s London squats or even the suburban haven of the People’s Park in Dun Laoghaire.
Paul Perry’s Clockhammer is a captivating work obsessed with time, not merely its passage, but its pressures, distortions, absences, and residues. Paul treats chronology as unreliable narration, where memory and its ghosts step forward not as testimony but as presence.
Mary was born in Connemara, and educated at University College Galway.
She has published ten books of poetry. She has also worked on poetry translation from Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan. She is a member of Aosdána.
She writes for RTE Radio and broadcasts her work regularly. She has been Writer –in- Residence at NUI Galway, and the University of Limerick, and Trinity and has held the Chair of Irish Studies in Villanova University in Philadelphia.
Mary lectures and teaches widely, in the U.S. and Europe, particularly in Paris and in various parts of Spain. She has been Writer in Association with the RHA Gallery in Dublin, and was the 2019 Writer Fellow in Trinity College Dublin.
Mary is working on a memoir of childhood, as well as essays on place, and a new book of poems. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Galway University in 2020.
Her most recent collection, The Shark Nursery was published by Carcanet in Summer 2024 and for which she won The Walcott Prize, along with Teresa Lola.
She is working on new poems and a collection of prose and translations from the Spanish poets Jiminez and Machado.
Her radio work includes a recent episode of ‘Giant at my Shoulder’ on Lorca.
Liam Carson is the director of the IMRAM Irish Language Literature Festival, and the author of the memoir call mother a lonely field, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2013. His collection Belfast Twilight: haiku, senryu and micro-poems was published by Salmon Poetry in 2025. It explores landscape, nature, family life, and memory. Presented in haikai (or haiku sequences), it creates kaleidoscopic montages that evoke various worlds – from Belfast’s docklands at twilight to windswept islands off the west of Ireland.
Paul Perry is an award-winning poet and novelist. He has co-authored four international bestselling novels as Karen Perry, and his own novels The Garden and Paradise House (2025, Somerville Press) are critically acclaimed. He is a Professor at UCD where he directs The Mary Lavin Centre for Creative Writing. He has won the Hennessy Prize and the Listowel Poetry Prize, and has written five poetry collections, the last of which was shortlisted for the Farmgate Prize for Poetry. Clockhammer is Paul’s first book with Doire Press.
