The author of A Thread of Violence, Notes from an Apocalypse and To Be a Machine, Mark O’Connell’s creative non-fiction has gained national and international renown.

His exploration of transhumanism in his first book To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers was awarded the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize and the 2019 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He was also shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

From extreme biohacking in Silicon Valley to doomsday ‘preppers’ in New Zealand, Mark draws on the personal to interrogate the collective crises facing humanity. Published at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back is described by Sally Rooney as “the perfect handbook for the end of times” and provides a fascinating insight into the measures being taken around the world to escape the apocalypse.

Taking a different turn with the subject of his most recent work, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder, Mark revisits a renowned and violent episode from modern Irish history with the crimes of Dublin socialite Malcolm Macarthur. Bestselling author Colm Toíbín describes this work as having been “nourished by a powerful moral intelligence and an enormous curiosity”.

Mark was awarded his PhD in English (2011) from Trinity College Dublin and is a former alumnus of the Trinity Long Room Hub where he spent time as an early career research fellow. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Guardian. He is also a columnist for the Irish Times.

The new Rooney Writer Fellow said: 

“I'm absolutely thrilled to be given the opportunity to spend time at the Trinity Long Room Hub as Writer Fellow. Having spent a year here in 2011 as a postdoctoral researcher, the Hub was an important place for my development as a writer. It's wonderful to be back here, and to be part of a community of scholars, whose fascinating research is likely to spark off all kinds of inspiration in my own work”. 

Trinity Long Room Hub Director Eve Patten welcomed Mark and commented:

“The Rooney fellowship provides a space for writers to engage with some of the cutting-edge research covered by Trinity’s arts and humanities disciplines. Given the intersection of Mark’s writing with many of our key research areas, this promises to be a fertile collaboration.”   

More about the Fellowship: 

The Rooney Writer Fellowship was established in 2021 with the support of Dr Peter Rooney.  The Fellowship enables a creative writer to join the research community in the Trinity Long Room Hub and to engage with the institute’s research themes and programmes.

Previous fellows have included author Caitríona Lally, poet, pacifist and fabulist Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe and Booker-prize nominated author Paul Murray.

 

Related links:

Listen to Mark O'Connell speaking as part of our 2018 Behind the Headlines panel 'What does it mean to be human in the 21st century?'.