Marsha O'Mahony
Writer / Author
Marsha O’Mahony is a writer, author, and oral historian.
It was her first published work, ‘The Burakumin as caste: Japan’s untouchables’, that led her to focus her storytelling skills on the underrepresented.
She is currently a Story Fellow at Cardiff Metropolitan University.
She has worked for local, national and international news organisations, including time on a New York lifestyle desk!
Her books (with an appearance at Hay Festival!) are based around her oral history work. This has covered such diverse areas as the Gwent Levels, the River Wye, social housing in Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, and Cardiff, the Irish diaspora in the West Midlands, and hop growing in the West Midlands.
Her work draws on ethnography, narrative, and behavioural science. Its purpose is to create engagement and meaning. Not just helping people understand ideas – but helping them connect with something that feels real.
Explore My Work
Explore My Work
Storytelling Skills in Practice
Services
Marsha’s approach centres on adding rich qualitative context to quantitative facts (humanising data): metrics illustrate performance, but stories show consequence, a democratic approach to storytelling.
Her work is characterised by quiet persistence and a genuine commitment to building trust with individuals and communities. By weaving together oral history, environmental reflection, and cultural memory, Marsha crafts a compelling narrative that reminds readers of
the significance of their space and landscape - highlighting the profound connections between communities and the spaces they inhabit, and how these relationships mutually shape both people and place.
She captures the authentic voices and reflections of her interviewees, weaving them together in a fascinating, intimate history of their
community.
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Connect with Marsha for writing services, including content creation, memoir and ghost writing commissions, editing and personalised
projects tailored to your needs. Also heritage and community projects, from project management, oral history collection and training, and exhibition planning and curation.
