Mary Dorcey

Life and education

Mary Dorcey was born in County Dublin, Ireland. She is a member by peer election of Aosdána the Irish Academy of Arts and Letters.

She was educated in Ireland and at the Open University and in France at University Paris Diderot, Paris 7.

She is a Research Associate at Trinity College, Dublin where for ten years she was a writer in residence at the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, during which time she conducted seminars on contemporary English literature and led a creative writing workshop. She has also taught in the School for Justice at University College Dublin

She has published six collections of poetry, one novel, one collection of short stories and one novella.

Dorcey was the first woman in Irish history (1974 to the present) to advocate in Ireland and internationally for LGBT rights. She was a founder member of Irish Women United, Women for Radical Change and The Movement for Sexual Liberation.

She has lived in the United States, England, France, Spain and Japan.

Recognition

Dorcey is a member by peer election of the Irish Academy of Arts and Literature, Aosdána . She won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for Literature in 1990 for her Short Story collection A Noise from the Woodshed. Her novel Biography of Desire has been both a best seller and achieved critical acclaim and has been reprinted three times.

Her poetry and fiction has for twenty five years been taught internationally at universities throughout Europe, the United States and Canada. It has been reproduced in more than one hundred collections. Since 1987 her writing has attracted a wealth of international research and has been the subject of countless academic essays and critiques. Her poetry is taught on both the Irish Junior Certificate English course and on the British O Level English curriculum. 'FIRST LOVE' has been selected once more for the revised Junior Cycle.The same poem was included in the BBC Anthology 'A Hundred Favourite Poems of Childhood.' Her poetry has been performed on radio and television (RTÉ, BBC, and Channel 4.) and her stories have been dramatized for radio (BBC) and for stage productions in Ireland, Britain and Australia: 'In the Pink' (The Raving Beauties) and, 'Sunny Side Plucked.'

She has won five major awards for literature from the Arts Council of Ireland: 1990, 1995, 1999 and 2005 and 2008.

Themes

Much of her work explores issues of sexuality, identity and the multifaceted lives of women through their role as mothers, daughters, and lovers. Her themes include the cathartic role of the outsider, political injustice and the nature of the erotic power to subvert and transfigure. She has won popular and international critical acclaim for her portrayal of romantic and erotic relationships between women and her subversive and tender view of the mother/daughter dynamic.