Learning to be Irish
by Maria C. McCarthy
May 2025 PB. 202pp 203x127mm (5×8”) 978-1-9161733-4-7
£11.99 US$12.99 €11.99 CAN$18.99 AUS$20.99
USA: Barnes & Noble / Amazon.com
Canada: !ndigo
UK: Abe Books / Amazon.co.uk / Blackwell / Foyles / Waterstones
Australia/New Zealand: Booktopia / Fishpond
Learning to be Irish showcases the best new and collected writings of a child of Irish migrants. Raised in Surrey in the 1960s and ’70s, ‘the filling in the sandwich’ of a family of five children, Maria C. McCarthy dances to Irish showbands, learns rebel songs at an uncle’s knee, hears home truths, half-truths and white lies from the women that gather in her mother’s kitchen, and learns to be English after the IRA bombs two pubs in Guildford. Learning to be Irish is a search for identity, a chronicle of a lost generation, and a yearning for truths that may never be known.
Maria C. McCarthy’s Learning To Be Irish, comprising poems, stories, and memoir, is a welcome addition to a wave of second-generation Irish writers born in England. McCarthy is a particularly fine poet, and I recommend her sequence ‘Mitchelstown’ to all who are interested in the delicate relations between native and exile. Learning To Be Irish can take its place alongside the work of such writers as Ian Duhig, Shane MacGowan, and Martina Evans. A terrific book.
John O’Donoghue, author of Sectioned: A Life Interrupted, The King From Over The Water and The Servants and Other Strange Stories
Quietly devastating. A mature and truthful exploration of complex emotions, conflicting loyalties, identity, belonging. Through her mastery of different forms of writing: poetry, story, memoir, McCarthy shows us the beating heart of the second-generation Irish in England.
S.M. Jenkin, author of Fire in the Head and Unspeakable, and co-editor of Inspired by Six Women who Shook the World
About the Author
Maria C. McCarthy was born in 1959 and raised in a community of Irish migrants in Epsom, Surrey. Her Irish heritage features strongly in her writing. She is the author of two poetry collections: strange fruits and There are Boats on the Orchard; a collection of linked short stories, As Long as it Takes; and is contributing editor of Unexplored Territory. All four books are published by Cultured Llama. She is also a contributing editor of Inspired by Six Women Who Shook the World (Medway Libraries). Maria was the winner of the Society of Authors’ Tom-Gallon Trust Award 2015 for her short story More Katharine than Audrey. In 2011, she co-founded Cultured Llama Publishing with her husband, Bob Carling, and was poetry and fiction editor until the press closed in 2023. She has an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from the University of Kent. She lives in the Medway Towns.
www.medwaymaria.co.uk / Substack
Keywords: memoir; poetry; prose; language; literature; fiction; short fiction; Ireland; England
Also by Maria C. McCarthy
strange fruits (Cultured Llama and Word Aid, 2011)
Unexplored Territory (Cultured Llama, 2012)
As Long as it Takes (Cultured Llama, 2014)
There are Boats on the Orchard (Cultured Llama, 2017)
Inspired by Six Women Who Shook the World, contributing editor with S.M. Jenkin (Medway Libraries, 2023)