Mary Dorcey

Dorcey was born in County Dublin, Ireland, in 1950.[1] She was the first Irish student at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, and attended Paris Diderot University in Paris, France.[2] She has lived and worked in the United States, England, France, Spain, and Japan, and now resides in County Wicklow.[1][3][4]

She is a research associate at Trinity College Dublin,[2] where she conducted contemporary English literature seminars and led a creative writing workshop during her ten years as a writer in residence at the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies. She also taught in the School for Justice at University College Dublin.[2][1]

Her first collection of poetry, Kindling, was published in 1987 by the feminist lesbian publishing house Onlywomen Press. She has since published six additional poetry collections, one novel, a novella and a group of short stories.[1] Major themes of her work include lesbian sexual attraction, sensuality, and the suffering and solidarity of women.[2]

Dorcey is viewed as a pioneer of Irish gay and lesbian rights and writing.[2][5] She came out as bisexual in 1974. She joined the Irish Women's Liberation Movement in 1972, and was a founding member of Irish Women United, Women for Radical Change, and The Movement for Sexual Liberation. [2][6][7]

Dorcey's poetry and fiction are taught at universities throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, Africa, and China.[1][8] Her poems are on the English curriculum for the Irish Junior Certificate and British GCSEs.[2] '"First Love"' was selected for the revised Junior Cycle and included in the BBC anthology, A Hundred Favourite Poems of Childhood.[9] Her work has attracted international research and has been the subject of academic essays and critiques. It has been reproduced in more than one hundred anthologies representing Irish, gay, and women's literature. Her poems have been performed on radio and television stations, such as BBC, RTÉ, and Channel 4. Her stories have been dramatized for radio and stage productions in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Australia.[2] In March 2023, her poem "Summer" was broadcast on the London Underground to mark St Patrick's Day.[1]

Dorcey won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for her short story collection A Noise from the Woodshed [2] in 1990. In 2010, following nominations by poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and novelist Eugene McCabe, Dorcey was elected to the Irish Academy of writers and artists, Aosdána. She has won five major awards for literature from the Arts Council of Ireland in 1990, 1995, 1999, 2005, and 2008.[1]

Her poetry and fiction explore issues of sexuality, identity, and the multifaceted lives of women through their roles 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 portraying romantic and erotic relationships between women and her subversive and tender view of the mother/daughter dynamic.[2][7]

• Lesbian Poetry

• Holoch, Naomi (2010). The Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction. Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 368.