Thomas O'Malley

|Associate Professor
Academic Appointments
  • Director of Creative Writing

  • Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing

Thomas O'Malley is the author of This Magnificent Desolation (2013), a New York Times Editor's Choice and shortlisted for the 2013 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, and In the Province of Saints (2005), which received critical acclaim from The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, amongst others. It was voted one of the ten best first novels of 2005 by Booklist and chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the top twenty-five books of the year in their Books to Remember from 2005.  He is also the author of the noir, Serpents in the Cold (2015), co-authored with Douglas Graham Purdy, and hailed by Reed Farrel Coleman, as "a startling work of art, a beautifully rendered, atmospheric tale of crime and punishment set in mid-twentieth century Boston." Serpents in the Cold garnered praise from The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews, Publisher's Weekly and Booklist, among others. It was a Boston Globe Special Feature and critically praised in Boston Magazine and on WBUR and NPR. Its sequel, We Were Kings (2016) was a starred review by Kirkus and Booklist and featured as one of Kirkus' 20 Summer Must Read Crime Novels of 2016.  His work has been anthologized in Where Love is Found: 24 Tales of Connection (Washington Square Press) and A Fictional History of the United States (Akashic Books) and his fiction in such magazines as PloughsharesGlimmer Train, Shenandoah, Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Mississippi Review. He has recently completed a dystopian near-future novel, At the End the Sea, an Irish folk-goth-punk novel, The Lingering, and a film adaptation of Serpents in the Cold, that has been optioned by AMC as an original eight episode series entitled, Nocturne, with director David M. Rosenthal, A Single Shot (2013), The Perfect Guy (2015), How It Ends (2018), Jacob's Ladder (2019) and set to star Oscar Award winner, Sam Rockwell, with Executive Producer, Chuck Hogan, writer and producer of The Town (2010), The Strain (2014), and 13 Hours (2016). He is currently working on a literary horror, The Drowned People, set in New England of the 1600s.

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Contact

646-3452
Sanborn, Room 005
HB 6032

Education

  • Kennedy College, New Ross, Wexford
  • B.A. University of Massachusetts at Boston
  • M.F.A. University of Iowa

Selected Publications

  • Were Were Kings, (Mulholland; Little, Brown & Co., 2016).

    Serpents in the Cold, (Mulholland; Little, Brown & Co., 2016). Paperback

    Serpents in the Cold, (Mulholland; Little, Brown & Co., 2015). Hardback

    This Magnificent Desolation, (Bloomsbury USA, 2013).

    In the Province of Saints, (Little Brown, & Co., 2005).

     

     

Works In Progress

  • The Lingering, a novel.

  • At the End the Sea, a novel.

  • The Drowned People, a novel.

NOVELS