Against Silence – Maria Wallace
Maria Wallace was born in Catalonia, but lived her teenage years in Chile. Later she married and settled in Dublin. She drew and painted all her life, though also took up the challenge of writing in a language not her own as a way to relieve some of the friction caused by her divided loyalties.
In 1996 she founded Virginia House Creative Writers, a groups she still facilitates today. She has edited four anthologies of their work, the last one, to be launched in a couple of months, is a celebration to their twenty years existence.
She has a BA in English and Spanish Literature, 2004, an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature, 2005. She has won many national and international poetry prizes, amongst them The Sunday Tribune Hennessy Literary Awards, 2006. Her work has been published in Ireland, England, Italy, Australia and Catalonia. In 2015 she participated in the ISLA Festival, a gathering of writers from Ireland, Spain, and Latin America.
In 2010 she published ‘Second shadow’ and in 2014 ‘The blue of distance’, two bilingual poetry collections (English – Catalan) both her own work and both from Catalan publishing houses. She is the yearly judge of The Jonathan Swift Awards.
© Maria Wallace