Each spring since 2000, Villanova University chooses a distinguished Irish writer to hold its Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Chair of Irish Studies. Named for a Villanova graduate who was former CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb and US ambassador to Sweden, the Heimbold chair has since become one of the most prestigious Irish studies positions in the United States.
The 2023 Heimbold Chair holder is Mary O’Donoghue, who has published books of award-winning poetry which include Tulle (Salmon Poetry, 2001) and Among These Winters (Dedalus, 2007). She has written prize-winning fiction, including her debut novel It Is Before the House Burns (Lilliput, 2010) and takes place on the West Coast of Ireland. Booker Prize-winning Irish novelist Anne Enright (The Gathering) described the novel as “electric, real, and utterly modern: this is a voice to welcome and to watch.”
To kick off Villanova’s 2023 Literary Festival, O’Donoghue gave this year’s Heimbold Chair Reading at Villanova’s Connelly Center on Thursday February 23. Irish Ambassafor Geraldine Byrne Nason and Andrew Bryne, Deputy Consul General of Ireland, were in attendance.
Over the past fifteen years, O’Donoghue’s short stores have appeared in the Dublin Review, Granta, the Georgia Review, AGNI, Salamander and other literary journals. A brand new book of previously unpublished short stories as well as new stories will be published in July 2023, published by Stinging Fly Press.
O’Donoghue knows the west coast of Ireland like a native, because she is. She grew up on a farm with her parents and three sisters in Kilkeedy, a hamlet in County Clare on the edge of the Burren, a haunting, rocky landscape that each spring blossoms with alpine flowers.
O’Donoghue attended St. Joseph’s Convent School in Gort, County Galway. She later earned both her B.A. (1996) and M.Phil. (1998) in Irish Studies from the National University of Ireland, Galway.
After university, she began to write poetry seriously when she took a course in creative writing at the Galway Arts Center given by leading contemporary Irish language poet Louis de Paor. Maintaining contact with de Paor over the years, O’Donoghue continues to translate his Irish language poetry into English. This collaborative relationship has not only honed her skills as a translator but also has enhanced her own craft as a poet. She has collaborated with de Paor on a recent bilingual book translation of his poetry: The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue (Bloodaxe Books, 2014).
In the early 2000s, O’Donoghue emigrated to Boston where she secured a part-time teaching position in the Arts and Humanities department at Babson College, Wellesley, MA. In 2011 she earned tenure at Babson, and in 2017 she was promoted to Full Professor. She is married to another academic writer, James McNaughton, who is a Dublin-born teacher of modernist Literature at the University of Alabama. She commutes back and forth between their home together in Tuscaloosa and her place in Boston.
Translating and writing poetry, O’Donoghue found, enhanced her fiction writing.
“My poetry does affect the way I write my fiction,” she says. “I notice in my stories a lyrical impulse which animates my sentences. I am not interested in simply content creation or plots. I am interested in more surreal states: in waiting, in transit, in strangeness and in psychic borderlands.”
O’Donoghue credits her appointment as the fiction editor of the literary journal AGNI as one of the influences that caused to focus more on short story and novel writing. AGNI, published by Boston University, features the very best contemporary writers whose fiction O’Donoghue gets to read and edit.
O’Donoghue will give another talk along with Lisa McInerney in a discussion to be held at Villanova’s Falvey Library on Wednesday April 19. 4 PM. O’Donoghue herself selected McInerney, a Cork based novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and editor, to engage in a literary focused discussion with her.
McInerney’s novel, The Glorious Heresies, tells the story of five misfits living on the fringe’s of Ireland’s post-crash society. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and Desmond Elliott Prize in 2016. It’s part of a trilogy of novels that ITV Studios plans to turn into a TV project. McInerney is contracted to write the scripts.
You can read more about Mary O’Donoghue and sample some of her poetry here.
