Maria McManus

Maria McManus is a poet and playwright from Enniskillen currently residing in Belfast. She has published several poetry collections with Lagan Press, including We Are Bone (2013), Reading the Dog (2006), and The Cello Suites (2009) which was accompanied by an original score composed and played by cellist Tom Hughes. In 2005, Maria McManus wrote the Blackout Show (2005) for Red Lead Arts, commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the end of World War II. Other scripts include His n Hers (2005) and Nowhere Harder (2004), which she wrote for Replay Theatre Company, and Bruised (2008) a play questioning life and death in an imagined future, which she co-wrote with Stacey Gregg, Maria Connolly and Rosemary Jenkinson for Tinderbox Theatre Company. Maria performed Sky, You Are Too Big… (2019) with poets Viviana Fiorentino and Nandi Jola, a project with the John Hewitt Society to celebrate International Migrants Day, which raised awareness of Larne House Visitors Group. In 2005 Maria McManus was awarded the inaugural Bedell Scholarship for Literature and World Citizenship, by Aspen Writers Foundation, Colorado USA. Maria McManus is art director and founder of Quotidian - Word on the Street, a company dedicated to bringing literature into public spaces. Under this role, she directed the Poetry Jukebox project in 2017 to bring poetry into the city space.

This donation from Maria McManus contains a jumper she knitted for her daughter, and an essay response to finding the jumper in a drawer 30 years later. Maria McManus also features in the Tinderbox Theatre Company archive, and within the Red Lead Arts collection.