In 2007 Mary O’Malley made a voyage on the Irish marine research ship the Celtic Explorer. It took her far out into the Atlantic, and it returned her to a self and a country made strange. Valparaiso, a collection begun at sea, is a book of searches and discoveries, plumbing oceanic depths and returning to a shore that ‘marks the start of possibility’. The surge and swell of the sea sounds in it, a place of wonders where the imagination is freed. ‘What would sing in me is the deep ocean.’
As the scientists chart a course dictated by the demands of research, as Ireland is careering from boom to bust, Mary O’Malley explores the science of going under and staying afloat. She returns to an altered place, and is herself changed by an odyssey that has taken her around the Atlantic and Europe, into her past and back to a kind of homecoming.

'Mary O'Malley's seascapes [...] are suffused with such beauty and sonorous mystery and rhythmic care that they lift us above ourselves and the time we inhabit.'
Colm Toibin, Irish Times, 8th December 2012

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.