Mark O’Flynn's poetry collections include The Too Bright Sun (1996), The Good Oil (2000), What Can Be Proven (2007), Untested Cures
(2011), The Soup’s Song
(2015), Shared Breath (2017) and Cicada Music, (2026). His short stories and reviews have appeared in a wide range of journals and magazines,
both in Australia and overseas.
His novel, Grassdogs, won the Varuna Manuscript Award and was published in 2006 by Harper Collins. It was followed by The Forgotten World, (2013).
A collection of short stories, White Light, was also published later that year. He has also published a memoir, False Start, (2013).
A recent novel, The Last Days of Ava Langdon, (UQP, 2016) was shortlisted for both the Miles Franklin Award and the Prime Minister’s
Literary Award for Fiction, as well as winning the Voss Literary Award, 2017. Recent books include the collection of short stories
Dental Tourism (Puncher & Wattmann 2020), and Undercoat: Poems about Paintings, launched by Peter Minter on 17th March, 2022.
Mark lives in the Blue Mountains, NSW.
Cicada Music is Australian author Mark's O'Flynn new (2026) poetry collection, from Walleah Press. O'Flynn's short stories, novels and poetry have been widely published.
There is not enough room here to adequately explain that in addition to the wit, literary chutzpah, lively humour, and general bon vivant-ism you
will find here in Mark O'Flynn's Cicada Music there is insight, emotional depth and fine writing, so, I won't. Best find out for yourself.
Carol Jenkins
Whether it's in a quirky series of almost sonnets inspired by the seas of the moon, or a lush response to a painting by Vermeer, Mark O'Flynn's intelligent
good humour shines through. Cicada Music is a book to be relished.
Mike Ladd
On Darling Point
Waiting for a phone call
Mowing with Hayfever
Haiku
Mark O'Flynn — Louise Oxley's Compound Eye,
Five Islands Press, 2003
Mark O'Flynn — Tony Curtis'
The Book of Winter Cures,
Black Hills Poetry Press, 2002
Mark O'Flynn — Tim Thorne's
Best Bitter,
PressPress, 2006
Mark O'Flynn – Jennifer Harrison's Folly and Grief, Famous Reporter 34
, December 2006
Mark O'Flynn — 'Avalon Burning': a review of Deb Westbury's
The View From Here, New and Selected Poems,
Brandl & Schlesinger, 2008
Mark O'Flynn – an abridged version of this speech was given to launch the work of Ric Adamson, Lucy Dougan, Jane Gibian, Judy Johnson, Alistair Stewart, and Jane Williams
as part of Five Islands Press' New Poets' Program, Series 5, Varuna, The National
Writers' House,
5th July 1998
Bertie Beetles, Famous Reporter 35,
June 2007
The Parlour, Famous Reporter 39, June 2009
New Uses for the Penguin Book of Science Fiction, Famous Reporter 34,
December 2006
The Rare, Endangered Leura Skink, Famous Reporter 37, June 2008
Pressure of a Ladder-Round, Communion Literary Journal, issue 7,
June 2017
The Claw, Communion Literary Journal 14, December 2020
Half-Built Houses, Communion Literary Journal 15, June 2021