Audrey Molloy has been selected for the Forward Prize longlist for Best Collection for her 2025 book, Fallen.
‘Wives are afraid of me now.’ From the opening line of Fallen there is a sense of danger and intimacy. In her latest and most risqué collection Audrey Molloy asks: What makes a good person? What does it mean to be a fallen woman? And can she ever redeem herself? ‘You are one side of an abyss. Everything decent, the other.’
‘Fallen is, to a large degree, a book about scrutiny, about the public gaze, about shame and about guilt . . . From its opening lines, Fallen performs a thought-provoking enactment of the human need to craft the wreckage of our lives into stories, particularly when we are seen as, see ourselves as, or can only partially view ourselves as, the agents of that wreckage . . . Fallen comprises a layered and fascinating exercise in story-telling as atonement, reparation, confirming how poetry has always been concerned with concealing as much as it purports to reveal in its bid for connection. It is a lonely art. It is the art of loneliness.’
— Maria Johnston, Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 148
Our congratulations to all those selected. See all longlists on www.forwardartsfoundation.org
