Celebrating the launch of her new poetry collection The Shark Nursery, Mary O'Malley will be in conversation with playwright Marina Carr at Kennys Bookshop, Galway, on Thursday 4th July at 6pm. This is a free but ticketed event, and all are welcome! Tickets can be reserved here.


Mary O'Malley was born in Connamara and launched her poetry career in 1990 with her collection A Consideration of Silk. She has since published six other books including a New and Selected. Her poems have been translated into several languages.

Marina Carr is an Irish playwright who has written nearly 30 plays. She came to prominence in the 1990s and is known for writing intense and often dark plays, and for being a particularly prolific and skilful voice in Irish drama.

The 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.

Joseph O'Connor says that The Shark Nursery promises 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."

Eavan Boland said of Mary O'Malley: "she is a true artist in sketching the beautiful, small details without which the essence of place, and the identity dependent on it, can be all too easily erased."

Mary O'Malley will sign copies of the first edition of The Shark Nursery at this launch event, which will be available to purchase on the night. The book is also available for pre-order on kennys.ie.

This event is ticketed but spaces are limited. Tickets are free. Reserve them here.


If you have any questions on this event or would like to be notified of other events at Kennys Bookshop, please email sarah@kennys.ie. We look forward to seeing you there!