Mel McMahon; Biographical Note

Welcome,

He was born in Lurgan in 1968. McMahon is an author and teacher of more than 30 years. He received his MEd from Queen’s University, Belfast and he is currently Head of English in the Abbey Grammar School, Newry, County Down, Northern Ireland.

As a student at college, he had poems anthologised with writers such as Nobel Prize Winner, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Michael Longley and was longlisted twice for the Forward International Poetry Prize. He has had his work published in The Irish News, The Belfast Telegraph, The Irish Times, Causeway Magazine, The Honest Ulsterman, Poetry Ireland and Books Ireland, amongst others. His work has been collected in numerous anthologies including Living Landscapes (edited by Donald Choice), A Conversation Piece (edited by Adrian Rice), Local Wonders (edited by Pat Boran), and he has had two collections of poems published:  Out of Breath (2016) and Beneath Our Feet (2018). With Adrian Rice, he co-founded the Abbey Press in 1997.

Paula Meehan, former Ireland Professor of Poetry, has called Mel McMahon “… an archaeologist of memory, private and communal,” whilst poet, Colin Dardis, said of Out of Breath: “McMahon’s crafting of verbs shines throughout. Here is a poet not afraid to be inventive and push language into new applications. He turns a mean phrase illuminating whole poems with just one or two dazzling lines of original thought.”

Author Phillip Orr described Beneath Our Feet as “…a poetic tribute to probably the greatest of the First World War poets. I'd recommend it as invaluable reading.”

Sir Ken Robinson, author of The Element, described it as “…a piercing poetic reflection on the human experience of war. Each of these brief, finely crafted pieces is a penetrating evocation of momentary fragments of that experience. It is an insightful, moving and timely work.”

Mel McMahon has also been granted writing awards by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and has received an award from Newry and Mourne Council for his contribution to language and literature in Northern Ireland. His work has been broadcast regularly on national radio and television and for several years he was Writer-in-Residence for The Newry Reporter.

A frequent reader of his work at festivals, in 2018 he was invited as one of the key speakers for the centenary celebrations of Wilfred Owen's death in Ors, France. As part of the celebrations Mel McMahon’s poetic tribute to Owen had been used in secondary schools in that area and pupils’ poetic responses to his work lined the trees from the Forester’s Cellar down to the Sambre-Oise River where Owen was killed in 1918. During the recent pandemic he received several commissions, including involvement in the making of a film funded by NI Screen on the Covid outbreak. This film, A Silent War, is largely inspired by the work of Northern Ireland poet, Ross Thompson.

Mel McMahon was also commissioned to write a poem by Maria McManus for her Poetry Jukebox project. This involved multiple poets, each writing their vision of a new Ireland 100 years from now. This poem was broadcast in Ireland and in France. In January 2022, he wrote a poem to mark the centenary of the death of Ernest Shackleton. This poem, ‘Oratory’, was encased in a specially commissioned violin made from driftwood and the floorboards of Shackleton’s old home in Edinburgh. His reading of this poem on Twitter gained nearly 10,000 views and was broadcast on national television and radio in Scotland.

Mel McMahon lives in Newry, County Down with his wife, Bernadette. He has two children, Claire and Mark. 

His first collection of poems, Out of Breath was published in 2016 . The second collection, Beneath Our Feet was published in 2018. The third collection, Holding Fire is coming soon.