Mary O’Donoghue grew up in Co. Clare and now divides her time between Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Boston, Massachusetts. Her short stories have appeared in Granta, Subtropics, Kenyon Review, the Common, Dublin Review, Stinging Fly, Banshee, Georgia Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her first collection of short stories will be published by Stinging Fly Press in 2023. She has twice received a fiction fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her other distinctions include being longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award and winning an Irish Times prize for short fiction responding to economic crisis. Her novel Before the House Burns appeared from Lilliput Press in 2010. She is a professor of English at Babson College, Mass; senior fiction editor at the journal AGNI; and 2023 Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.
Her critically acclaimed first collection of stories, The Hour After Happy Hour (Stinging Fly Press), was published in June 2023.