Audrey Molloy grew up in Blackwater, a village in County Wexford, Ireland, and has lived in Sydney since 1998. Her debut collection, The Important Things (The Gallery Press, 2021) received the Anne Elder Award for a first collection of poetry and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize.
Her latest collection, The Blue Cocktail (The Gallery Press / Pitt Street Poetry) is available from poetry-loving book shops or to order from The Gallery Press. It was one of The Irish Times Best New Poetry Books of 2023. The Australian/New Zealand edition is available from Pitt Street Poetry.
Audrey’s chapbook, Satyress, was published by Southword Editions in 2020. Ordinary Time, a collaboration with Australian poet Anthony Lawrence, was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2022 and was one of Australian Book Review’s Books of the Year, 2022.
Drawing on a range of influences from multimedia culture to science and medicine, her poetry explores aspects of modern femininity, motherhood, transformation and impermanence. Her second collection engages more directly with the natural world of her adopted country, and explores ideas of ‘home’ in the context of the Irish diaspora.
Audrey’s poetry has appeared in literary journals and anthologies including Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, Southword, The Moth,The Irish Times, The London Magazine, The North, Magma, Stand, Mslexia, The Weekend Australian, Best of Australian Poems, Island and Meanjin.
In 2022 Audrey received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and was shortlisted for the 2022 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. She was awarded a Varuna Residential Fellowship in 2020. Her work has received, or been shortlisted for, several other awards. She has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the Manchester Writing School (Manchester Metropolitan University). In a parallel life she is an optometrist.
In 2021 she collaborated with Morag Anderson, Barbara DeCoursey Roy and Maeve McKenna on How Bright the Wings Drive Us, which won the Dreich Alliance Chapbook competition. Along with her three collaborators, Audrey was featured poet in the 2022 Phosphorescence Poetry Reading Series, produced by the Emily Dickinson Museum.
Audrey is co-editor for The Marrow, a journal of international poetry, which she founded with Daragh Byrne and Natalie Bühler in 2024.
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