Young poet Sophie Marx launches debut collection “The Anatomy of Melancholy”

By Oonagh Cassidy

Charlie Byrne’s hosts the launch of 22-year-old poet Sophie Marx’s highly anticipated debut collection this Thursday at 6pm.

The book launch marks a moment Sophie Marx once thought impossible. A final year student, Marx has been shaped by her experiences growing up; moving a lot and experiencing different cultures and countries from a young age.

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Sophie moved around frequently from the age of nine. “My life was kind of marked by a lot of being uprooted and settling down in new countries and cultures,” she explains. “Writing was always my one constant.” This constant became more than a coping mechanism; “It helped put my emotions into words, to understand what was going on inside of me.”

Sophie began writing poetry at sixteen, encouraged by a teenage crush, but her writing grew and deepened as she aged. “I wrote the first poem from the collection at the end of first year,” she says. “I kept writing and performing it with nothing really in mind. Eventually, a collection formed.

That organic formation became “The Anatomy of Melancholy”, a title which didn’t arrive until the eleventh hour. “It was the middle of the night,” Sophie laughs.

“I just wanted to get the submission out.” What followed was a rereading of the key words and themes in her poems, and she realised a common motif: her evolving understanding of melancholy. “The phrase ‘the anatomy of melancholy’ just struck me. It felt perfect.”

The poetry book itself is divided into three parts: Reclaiming My Religion, A Look into My Interior Life, and If Only Love Was That Simple. “What I was trying to do with the separation of the poems into different overall umbrella topics was to really show the different main elements that contributed to not only my own perception of melancholy, but what I see in different people or in other people as well.”

In tune with the raw vulnerability of her work, Sophie is open about the difficulty of seeing value in her writings. “It took me quite a while to just accept that I liked my own poetry,” she admits. “It didn’t sound like the poets I love reading, and that made me insecure at first. But I realised I didn’t need to copy them, I needed to find my own voice.”

That voice is now preserved in print, thanks to Olympia Publishers, a London-based press. The publishing process itself was another leap of faith. “I was up one night looking through the collection, and I thought… maybe this could be something. I looked up publishers online, submitted a few, and Olympia were first to respond. So, I just took a chance,” she says.

The launch, taking place in Galway’s beloved bookshop Charlie Byrnes, is set to be a cheerful evening of celebrations. “It’s my favourite bookshop,” Sophie says warmly. “My friends will be playing music on the harp and violin. There’ll be wine. I just really want it to be a moment of togetherness and to have people I care about there and celebrate this work in person.”

For young writers hoping to follow a similar path, Sophie offers some pragmatic encouragement and advice. “Read. A lot. And don’t be afraid to fail. I submitted so many poems that were rejected, and looking back, they were awful,” she says. “But it’s about trying, failing, and finding your own voice. That’s really what matters.”

Sophie Marx hopes to continue to write and publish books in the future, but for now, The Anatomy of Melancholy marks the beginning of her writing journey.