Molloy, Dorothy (Mary) (1942–2004), poet, painter and journalist, was born 10 June 1942 in Ballina, Co. Mayo, third child of Patrick Molloy, who was in the building trade, and his wife Kathleen, known as Doris (née Murphy). The family of two daughters and three sons moved to Dublin when Dorothy was six, and she was educated at Loreto Abbey, Dalkey. At UCD she studied French and Spanish, and visited France and Spain as an exchange student and as an au pair. After graduating, she worked for several years in Barcelona on behalf of the UCD Overseas Archive, a project established by Professor Patrick McBride of UCD which documented the history of the Irish diaspora on the continent of Europe. Molloy searched in Spanish archives for information about the lives and careers of the seventeenth‑ and eighteenth‑ century Irish 'Wild Geese', and published an article on her work in Éire–Ireland (autumn 1971). After she had finished working with the Overseas Archive project, Molloy stayed on in Spain, writing articles on Irish topics for a Spanish magazine, Destino, and on a regular basis for the Irish Independent as 'Our girl in Barcelona' ( her by‑line in the newspaper), where she covered life in Spain, especially art, politics and culture. She was also the Spanish correspondent of Art and Artists, a London based journal, and worked as curator and administrator of an art gallery. Earning her living in this way enabled her to paint. She won an award for painting in 1970, the first prize in the XI Salon Femenino de Arte Actual in Barcelona, and had successful solo exhibitions in Barcelona in 1971 and 1973. At first she used mixtures of what she called 'relatively unorthodox materials – coloured pencils, pens, biros, gouache, inks, acrylic – anything you could put on paper' ('Celebration of the life and work', [2]).
She helped organise a one‑man show in Dublin in 1967 for a Catalan painter, Julia Mateu. She returned to Ireland in December 1979 after fifteen years in Spain. She continued to paint in a variety of media and styles, and had successful solo exhibitions in Galway (1984) and Dublin (1991), selling a good deal of work. She was now painting in oils, especially on large canvasses. She was involved with the organisation of the 1980 Rosc exhibition of international contemporary art, but she was still drawn to scholarship and to linguistic studies, and in 1984 graduated M.Phil. in medieval studies from UCD, specialising in early Irish; her interest in languages and in language was life‑long. She also took a diploma in psychology. Work towards a Ph.D. degree (awarded 1997) led to the publication in 1999 of a scholarly edition (in Spanish) of a little‑known Spanish novel of chivalry, Arderique (1517). At the same time, she was increasingly involved with creative writing in English; from 1997 to 2003 she directed workshops in UCD in which her insights and support greatly helped her students, and with some of them she joined the Thornfield Poets Group, so‑called from the UCD building in which they first met.
She began to submit her own poetry to journals, and the publishers Faber and Faber in London, unusually impressed by the work of a newly found poetic talent, agreed in 2001 to publish her first volume. Hare soup came out in early 2004, but Molloy did not live to see the completed volume. She was diagnosed with liver cancer in November 2003, and despite a spirited response to the progress of the disease, died in Dublin on 4 January 2004. News of her death, just at the moment when she could have anticipated critical acclaim, added to the frisson caused by the book's appearance. Critics were startled by its vivid, painterly imagery, and by the unexpectedly darkly erotic imagination which had created the elegant, spiky, unsettling and humorously grotesque poems. The book was very widely and positively reviewed, and was awarded the inaugural Irish Times Poetry Now prize in March 2005.
Poems that were unpublished at her death, including some dealing with her cancer and hospital treatments, were collected and edited by her husband. They were published as Gethsemane day (2006) and Long‑distance swimmer (2009). Molloy's work is part of the canon of important modern Irish poetry; several of her poems appeared in anthologies, and in 2009 one of her poems featured in the anthology prepared for the English GCSE.
She married on 3 February 1983 in Dublin, Andrew Carpenter , then a lecturer and later a professor in the School of English at UCD, who survived her. She had no children. Her papers were deposited in the National Library of Ireland. A posthumous exhibition of her paintings and photographs was held in the O'Reilly Hall, UCD, on 6 April 2004.