Maura Dooley was born in Truro, grew up in Bristol, worked for some years in Yorkshire, and has lived in London for the past 30 years. Maura Dooley’s family background in Ireland and Wales has long been central to her work. She is a freelance writer and taught at Goldsmiths for many years. She edited Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets (1997) and The Honey Gatherers: A Book of Love Poems (2002) for Bloodaxe, How Novelists Work (2000) for Seren and Sylvia Plath on Writing (2026) for Faber. She was Poet-in-Residence at the Jane Austen House Museum, Chawton, in 2015, with her poems from the residency published by Smith|Doorstep in her pamphlet A Quire of Paper along with poems she invited other poets to contribute in a second pamphlet, All My Important Nothings.
Her first retrospective selection, Sound Barrier: Poems 1982-2002, was published by Bloodaxe in 2002, drawing on collections including Explaining Magnetism (1991) and Kissing a Bone (1996), both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Kissing a Bone and her later collection Life Under Water, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2008, were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poem 'Cleaning Jim Dine's Heart' was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2015, and was included in her collection, The Silvering (2016), also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2016. Her translation (with Elhum Shakerifar) of Azita Ghahreman's Negative of a Group Photograph (Farsi title: نگاتیو یک عکس دسته جمعی) was published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2018. Negative of a Group Photograph received an English PEN Award and was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2019. Her latest collections are Five Fifty-Five (2023) and Light that is both wave and particle (2027), the latter published in tandem with an updated retrospective, Dancing at Oakmead Road: Selected Poems (2027).
Author photo: Isadora Dooley Hunter
