Literature
Nuala O’Connor
Nuala O’Connor is a novelist, short fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She has published six novels, seven collections of short fiction, and five collections of poetry.
Nuala’s third novel, Miss Emily (Penguin USA/Sandstone UK, 2015), about the poet Emily Dickinson and her Irish maid, was shortlisted for the Novel of the Year 2015, longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award, and was on the Leaving Cert curriculum. Her fifth novel NORA (Harper Perennial/New Island, 2021), about Nora Barnacle, wife and muse to James Joyce, was published to critical acclaim in the USA, Ireland, the UK, Germany, Croatia, Estonia, Poland, and the Netherlands. Nominated for many awards, NORA was named a Top 10 2021 historical novel by the New York Times, and was the One Dublin One Book choice for 2022.
Nuala’s sixth novel Seaborne (New Island, 2024), about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, was nominated for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2024 Irish Book Awards.
Nuala’s short fiction has been widely published and anthologised, and won many awards including RTÉ Radio’s Francis MacManus Award, the Cúirt New Writing Prize, the Jane Geske Award (USA), the inaugural Jonathan Swift Award, the Cecil Day Lewis Award, and the 2022 Short Story of the Year in 2022 at the Irish Book Awards. In 2019 she won the James Joyce Quarterly competition to write the missing story from Dubliners, ‘Ulysses’. Her stories have appeared in Granta, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, The Stinging Fly, The Art of the Glimpse (anthology); Town and Country – the Faber anthology; The Long Gaze Back (anthology). A writer of flash narratives, Nuala is also founder and editor-in-chief at flash fiction e-zine Splonk (currently on hiatus).
Commissions have included Nuala’s curation of the ‘Love, Says Bloom’ exhibition at MoLI (Museum of Literature Ireland), on the Joyce family, for Ulysses 100. Her flash fiction ‘Eight’ was commissioned by Graphic Studio Dublin for the ‘Ulysses Imagined’ exhibition.
Prior to her Aosdána membership, she was awarded several Literature Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her residencies include the Cúirt Festival and Bay Path College in Massachusetts, and she has taught creative writing at arts centres, literary festivals, and in a prison. Nuala is on the board of the Elizabeth Bowen Society and is a member of the Word Forum at the IWC, and a founder member of two Galway-based groups: The Peers and Group 8 Artist Collective.
Her fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, was published to critical acclaim in 2025, by Arlen House. Nuala’s non-fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, Trasna, and elsewhere.
Nuala is currently writing a memoir about late-diagnosed autism. She recently wrote a new introduction to a standalone edition of Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’ (New Island, Nov. 2025). And her seventh novel, Stella Luna Sol, set between Greece and Ireland, will be published by New Island in spring 2027.
(Photo Credit: Úna O’Connor Photography)