Marina Carr

I am not aware of another woman who writes about tragedy with such grandeur. She goes to a deep place that has not just to do with society now but that touches an inner tragedy of existence.

— Joyce McMillen, New York Times

Marina Carr. From Irish Writers series (2012) © Ursula Burke

Marina Carr was born in 1964 and grew up in County Offaly. She graduated from UCD in 1987.

Early plays include Low in the Dark, This Love Thing and Ullaloo. The Gallery Press published The Mai, which won best new play award at the Dublin Theatre Festival; Portia Coughlan (Susan Smith Blackburn Award, 1997), By The Bog of Cats (1998, Irish Times/ ESB Award for Best New Play), On Raftery’s Hill (2000), Ariel (2002), Woman and Scarecrow (2006), The Cordelia Dream (2008), Marble (2009), 16 Possible Glimpses (2011), a version of Hecuba (2015) and Gilgamesh (2023).

Her awards include The Irish Times Best New Play Award, the Dublin Theatre Festival Best New Play Award 1994, a Macauley Fellowship, a Hennessey Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, an E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Puterbaugh Fellowship (2012) and in 2017 she was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Literature.

Her award-winning plays—largely poetic tragedies of rural Irish domestic life—have been produced around the world. Her works have been translated into French, German, and Norwegian.

She has been Writer-in-Residence at Trinity College, the Abbey Theatre, Princeton University and was the first John McGahern Writer-in-Residence in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra/DCU. She was Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2003.

Marina Carr is a member of Aosdána and lives with her family in Dublin.