Maria Byrne is an Irish-born, Chicago-based novelist and essayist whose work explores labor, spectacle, and the architectures that hold both. Raised in County Waterford and educated at Trinity College Dublin, she earned an MFA from the University of Michigan before settling in the Midwest. Before writing full-time, Maria worked as an archivist at a defunct soapworks in Cork and later as a researcher at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, experiences that inform her keen eye for the material textures of urban life.
Her fiction and essays have appeared in the Kenyon Review, The Stinging Fly, and Guernica. She is the author of Tremor Street and The Quiet Foundry, and the essay collection Render. Her work has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.
Maria Byrne teaches part-time at Columbia College Chicago and volunteers with local labor history organizations. She lives in Pilsen with her partner, a pianist, and a crate of flea-market candlesticks she swears she will someday polish.
