Molly McCloskey
Molly McCloskey (born 1964 in Philadelphia) is an American writer who spent many years living in Ireland. Her fiction has won several awards, including the RTÉ Francis MacManus Award (1995) and the first Fish Short Story Prize (1996). Stories like “Another Country” appeared in notable collections, and “This Isn’t Heaven” was recognized in the 2009 Davy Byrne’s Irish Writing Award.
Her memoir Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother (2011), about her schizophrenic brother, was named Memoir of the Year by The Sunday Times. She is the daughter of basketball coach Jack McCloskey. After growing up in North Carolina and Oregon, she moved to Ireland in 1989, settled in Sligo, and later moved to Dublin in 1998 to study. She holds a BA from Saint Joseph’s University, an MPhil from University College Dublin, and an MFA from Boston University.
McCloskey has written for The Guardian, The Irish Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Dublin Review. She was a Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin (2009–2010), teaching on the MPhil in creative writing. She has also worked with the United Nations in Kenya and has lived in Kosovo. She now lives in Washington, D.C.
Her first story appeared in 1992 in Dermot Healy’s Force 10. She published Solomon’s Seal (1997), a collection of short stories, and the novel Protection (2006). Circles Around the Sun received strong praise, and her 2017 novel Straying (published in the UK as When Light is Like Water) was well received and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. The Guardian praised Straying as very well written.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 20:04 (CET).