Poetry Reading: Mary O’Malley, Claudine Toutoungi and Charles Lang

Mary O’Malley was born in Connemara, and educated at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon for eight years and taught at the Universidade Nova there. She served several years on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the Cuirt 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 and Mayo.

She has been active in Environmental education for twenty years with a specific interest in the Sea and Bogland, working with a team of marine scientists and musicians. In the early 1990’s, she co-organised a Province wide schools programme, arising out of her work on the organising committee of an international Conference on demilitarisation of the Ocean, held in NUIG.
She has published nine books of poetry, including Valparaiso arising out of her Residency on the national marine research ship. Playing The Octopus and her latest book of poems, Gaudent Angeli are also published by Carcanet.

She has also worked on poetry translation from Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan. She is a member of Aosdana and has won a number of awards for her poetry. 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 has held the Chair of Irish Studies in Villanova University in Philadelphia. She 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.

She 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.

Claudine Toutoungi is an award-winning playwright and poet. Her three poetry collections with
Carcanet Press are Smoothie (2017), Two Tongues (2020), which won the 2021 Ledbury Poetry
Prize and Emotional Support Horse (2024) Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Guardian,
The Financial Times, The New Statesman, The Spectator and elsewhere. A featured poet on the
European poetry platform- Versopolis, her work has been widely anthologised, been translated
into Spanish and her live poetry contributions to festivals include Tongue Fu, Poetry East and
appearances on BBC Radio 4. Claudine’s plays Bit Part and Slipping ran at the Stephen Joseph
Theatre in 2014, following Slipping’s selection for New York’s Lark Play Centre’s international
HotINK series. Her original audio dramas for BBC Radio 4 include Deliverers, The Inheritors, The
Voice in my Ear and multiple dramatisations of work by writers such as Delphine de Vigan,
Josephine Tey and Mira Hamermesh. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.

Charles Lang is from Glasgow. His poems have appeared in numerous publications including Poetry Ireland Review, The Poetry Review and The Stinging Fly. He was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series in 2022. In 2024, he was Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, and was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.  His debut collection The Oasis was published this year by Skein Press.