Dr Una Mannion

Una Mannion is a novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel A Crooked Tree (Faber 2021) was shortlisted for The Irish Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Dalkey Emerging Writer Award and was winner of the Kate O’Brien Prize. Her second novel, Tell Me What I Am (Faber 2023), was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and was winner of the prestigious CWA 2024 Gold Dagger Award. In 2024, she was nominated for the An Post Irish Book Awards’ ’New Voices: 20 Best New Irish Writers’. She has won numerous prizes for her work including the Hennessy Emerging Poetry Prize (2017), Cúirt Short Fiction Award, Doolin Short Story Prize, Allingham Fiction Prize and Ambit prize among others.

Una’s fiction, poetry and literary journalism have been published in a wide range of newspapers, journals and anthologies, including The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, S Magazine, The Irish Writers’ Handbook (2023), Winter Papers, The Art of the Glimpse: One Hundred Irish Short Stories, Galway Stories, and Crannog. She edits The Cormorant, a broadsheet of poetry and prose.

Una studied English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, completed an M.A. in English at Temple University, Philadelphia and a PhD at University College Cork. In 2016, she undertook a further Writing M.A. in NUI Galway. Before joining the Oscar Wilde Centre and English Department at Trinity College Dublin, Una taught at ATU Sligo for 25 years where she founded the Writing + Literature programme