Mary O'Donoghue is a novelist, short story writer, poet and translator. She teaches writing fiction, rhetoric, and literature classes at Babson College. She is the author of the novel Before the House Burns (The Lilliput Press, 2010) and the poetry collections Among These Winters (Dedalus Press, 2007) and Tulle (Salmon Poetry, 2001). Her fiction has appeared in many European and US journals: Granta, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Irish Times, Sunday Times UK, Stinging Fly, Dublin Review, and elsewhere.

Mary O'Donoghue's translations of Irish-language poets Sen Rordin and Colm Breathnach are published in Leabhar na hAthghabhla/ Poems of Repossession (Bloodaxe Books/ Clo Iar-Chonnacht, 2016). Her translations of Rordin also appear in Selected Poems (Yale University Press, 2014). Her collaborative translations of the work of Irish-language poet Louis de Paor featured in the first major bilingual edition of his work, Ag Greadadh Bas sa Reilig/Clapping in the Cemetery (Cl Iar-Chonnachta, 2005), and in agus rud eile de/and another thing (Cl Iar-Chonnachta, 2010) and The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale's Tongue (Bloodaxe, 2014).

Her writing awards include Hennessy/Sunday Tribune New Irish Writer; a Tyrone Guthrie/Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellowship; an artist grant from Vermont Studio Center. She has also been awarded two artist fellowships from Massachusetts Cultural Council, most recently in 2012. In 2013 her short story The Sweet Forbearance in the Streets won the Irish Times/ Legends of the Fall prize for fiction responding to Ireland's economic crisis. In recognition of her body of work in poetry, fiction and translation, she received a Babson College Faculty Scholarship Award in 2008; for ongoing work she was named a Babson Research Scholar for 2015-2018. She is currently working on her next novel. She is Fiction Editor at the literary journal AGNI.