Winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2025
Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2025
Shortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025

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.

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 drive
And the bees are in the hive
They say the kids are safe inside
In Googletown

This 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.'

Prizes

Winner of Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2025,Short-listed for Pigott Poetry Prize 2025,Short-listed for Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025

'The Shark Nursery brings a fine lyric sensibility to subjects as diverse as Greek mythology, marine biology and the time/space continuum. ... Other poems push all the way into a lyrical surrealism rare in Irish poetry, harnessing metaphor's capacity to rough up our sense of the world as fixed and predictable.'
Vona Groarke, The Irish Times

'There are many memorable poems in The Shark Nursery, a book that speaks eloquently to our place in the natural world as well as to the challenges posed by the current political landscape. Overall, it is a rich and stimulating collection that cements O'Malley's reputation as one of Ireland's most important contemporary poets.
Tim Murphy, The Friday Poem

'The Shark Nursery is a one-of-a-kind book, filled with achingly beautiful poems that show a true artist at her absolute peak.'
Seán Kelly, Irish Examiner

'Sparking with easy wit and grim humor, smoldering with political anger, rippled through by a sadness that feels both oneiric and lucid, Mary O'Malley's new work critiques its historical moment while seeming, at the same time, to touch the very root of song.'
Ciaran O'Rourke, New Hibernia Review

Mary O'Malley was born in Connemara in Ireland and educated at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon for eight years and taught at Universidade Nova. She served on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the Cúirt International Poetry Festival for eight years. She was the author of its educational programme. She taught on the MA programmes for Writing and Education in the Arts at NUI Galway for ten years, held the Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2013, and has held Residencies in Paris, Tarragona, New York, NUI Galway, as well as in Derry, Belfast. She is deeply committed to education and the preservation of marine life and culture and is active in environmental education. She is a member of Aosdána and has won a number of awards for her poetry, including the 2016 Arts Council University of Limerick Writer's Fellowship and the 2018 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award for Playing the Octopus (2016). She was the Trinity Writer Fellow at the Oscar Wilde Centre for 2019. She writes and broadcasts for RTÉ Radio regularly. She spends time in Paris and Spain and lives in the West of Ireland. Visit Mary O'Malley's website.