Ahmed O'Connor is a Moroccan‑Irish novelist and design researcher raised between Tangier and County Kerry. Born in 1986, he studied maritime systems at University College Cork and anthropology at Abdelmalek Essaâdi University before spending a decade in port logistics, interface design, and community translation along the Strait of Gibraltar. His fiction blends speculative infrastructure, bureaucratic comedy, and the quiet grief of migration and maintenance.
O'Connor's short work has appeared in small‑press journals such as Semaphore Review, Waypoint Quarterly, and Lattice. He received the New Horizons Emerging Writer Award in 2022 and was a resident at the Harbourlight Arts Lab in 2023. His first collection, Coast of Small Machines, explored the poetics of repair and was shortlisted for the Estuary Book Prize. He divides his time between Cork and Tangier, volunteers with maritime safety workshops, and pretends not to be writing when he is labelling boxes of spare parts.
