Roisín O’Donnell
Roisín O’Donnell’s debut short story collection, Wild Quiet, was published in 2016 by New Island Books; it was listed as one of The Irish Times’ Favourite Books of 2016 and was shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award and the International Rubery Book Award, and longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times and elsewhere, and feature in Young Irelanders and in the award-winning anthologies of Irish women’s writing The Long Gaze Back and The Glass Shore. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Forward Prize, Roisín’s work has been shortlisted for many international awards, including the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award. In 2015, Roisín was awarded a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. She lives in Dublin.
Lisa Harding
Lisa Harding is an actress, playwright and writer. She completed an M.Phil. in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin in 2014. Her short story ‘Counting Down’ was a winner in the inaugural Doolin Writer’s Prize in 2013. Other stories have been published in The Dublin Review, Bath Short Story Award Anthology and Headstuff. Plays have been performed at Theatre503, Battersea Arts Centre and The Project Theatre. She has just been awarded an arts council bursary for her second novel, Overspill. Harvesting is her first novel.
Fiona O’ Rourke
Fiona O’Rourke is an emerging writer of fiction. In 2017 she was selected for the Arts Council NI & Irish Writers Centre XBorders Project and for the Irish Writers Centre-Cill Rialaig Writer in Residence programme. She was joint winner at the Novel Fair 2016 and earned the M.Phil. (Hons.) in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin in 2015. Her short stories have been published in Fish Anthology, broadcast for the RTÉ Francis MacManus Competition, and translated for Troquel Revista Da Letras. She wants to be a cat.
Oisín Fagan
Oisín Fagan has been published in The Stinging Fly, New Planet Cabaret and Young Irelanders and his work has featured at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. In 2016, he won the inaugural Penny Dreadful Novella Prize for The Hierophants. Hostages, his first collection, was published by New Island Books in the same year. He is a recipient of Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and is represented by Lucy Luck at C+W Agency.
Sam Blake
Sam Blake’s debut novel, Little Bones (Bonnier Twenty7) was an Irish Times and Sunday Times bestseller, spending eight weeks in the Irish Times top 10, with four weeks in the Number 1 slot. Little Bones introduces Garda Detective Cat Connolly – what appears to be a routine break-in has devastating consequences when Cat finds a baby’s bones concealed in the hem of a vintage wedding dress. The second book in the Cat Connolly trilogy was released by Bonnier Zaffre in spring 2017. Sam Blake is a pseudonym for Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin, the founder of The Inkwell Group publishing consultancy and the national writing resources website Writing.ie.
Louise O’Neill
Louise’s first novel, Only Ever Yours, was published in 2014 by Quercus. Louise went on to win the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year at the 2014 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards; the Children’s Books Ireland Eilís Dillon Award for a First Children’s Book; and The Bookseller’s inaugural YA Book Prize in 2015. The runaway success of her debut, originally published as a novel for Young Adults, meant Quercus issued an adult edition in 2015.
Louise’s second novel, Asking For It, was published in September 2015 to widespread critical acclaim. She has since won the Specsaver’s Senior Children’s Book of the Year at the 2015 Irish Book Awards, the Literature Prize at Irish Tatler’s Women of the Year Awards, and Best Author at Stellar magazine’s Shine Awards. It was voted Book of the Year at the Irish Books Awards 2015 and has spent 34 weeks in the Irish top 10 bestseller list. It was honored by the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature written for young adults by the American Librarian Association. A documentary of the same name – borne out of the novel, on the subject of rape culture, and presented by Louise – was aired in November 2016.
Louise is a freelance journalist for a variety of Irish national newspapers and magazines, covering feminist issues, fashion and pop culture. She contributed to I Call Myself A Feminist – a collection of essays from women under 30 explaining why they see themselves as feminists, which was published by Virago. She is currently working on her third novel.
Sinéad Gleeson
Sinéad Gleeson is a writer, editor, and freelance broadcaster. Her published essays have appeared in Granta, Winter Papers Vol. 2, Gorse, Elsewhere Journal, Autumn: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons and Banshee Vol. 1. One of her poems was included in Washing Windows? Irish Women Write Poetry, an anthology of 100 poems by Irish women writers. Her short story ‘Counting Bridges’ was longlisted for the 2016 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards.
Sinéad has edited three anthologies of short stories, including Silver Threads of Hope (2012), The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers (2015) which won the Best Irish Published Book at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards, and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women from the North of Ireland (2016) which also won Best Irish Published Book at the BGE Irish Book Awards in 2016. She has just completed a collection of essays which will be published by Picador, and is currently working on a novel.
June Caldwell
June Caldwell worked for many years as a freelance journalist and now writes fiction. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University Belfast. Room Little Darker, her acclaimed collection of short stories, was published by New Island Books in May 2017. Her story ‘SOMAT’ was published in the award-winning anthology The Long Gaze Back, and was chosen as a favourite by The Sunday Times. Her fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Winter Papers, and The Lonely Crowd. She is a prizewinner of the Moth International Short Story Prize and has been shortlisted for many others, including: the Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Colm Toíbín International Short Story Award, the Lorian Hemingway Prize, and the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize.
Alex Reece Abbott
Writing across genres, forms and hemispheres, Alex’s literary novel, The Helpmeet, was a 2016 Greenbean Irish Novel Fair winner. Her stories have won the Arvon, Crediton and Northern Crime prizes, and she was a finalist in the 2017 Bath Novella-in-Flash Award. Widely published and anthologised, her work features in the Word Factory’s Citizen season and has been selected for Bonsai: The Big Book of Small Stories (Canterbury University Press, 2018) the first anthology of New Zealand short-short fiction. Among others, her stories have shortlisted for the Bridport, Lorian Hemingway, Tillie Olsen, and Sunday Business Post-Penguin Short Story prizes.
Geraldine Mills
Geraldine Mills is a poet and fiction writer. She has had four collections of poetry and three of short stories published. She was awarded an Arts Council Bursary for The Weight of Feathers (Arlen House, 2007). She was a recipient of a Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for her third poetry collection, An Urgency of Stars, published by Arlen House in 2010.
In 2011, she toured the United States where she launched a poetry collaboration with New England poet Lisa C. Taylor, titled The Other Side of Longing (Arlen House 2011) and presented the prestigious Gerson Reading at the University of Connecticut. Her short story collections have been taught at the University of Connecticut, Eastern Connecticut State University and Emerson College, Mass, USA summer programmes.
She has won numerous awards for her fiction. She was the Millennium winner of the Hennessy/Tribune Emerging Fiction Award and the overall winner of the New Irish Writer Award for her story ‘Lick of the Lizard’. The Arts Council awarded her a second bursary in September 2014 to work on short fiction. Her first children’s novel, Gold, was published by Little Island in 2016. She is a fiction mentor with NUI Galway and is an online tutor in the short story with Creative Writing Ink.
Eoin Dolan Lane
Eoin Dolan Lane was a finalist in the 2016 Greenbean Novel Fair for In the Shadow of Hermes. He was also the fourth prize winner in the inaugural year of the RTÉ Frances Mac Manus Awards 1986, when James Plunkett was the head judge (the story was later published in the accompanying anthology by Mercier Press). In 2015, Eoin was shortlisted in the same awards for his story, ‘When Blue Snowflakes Fall’. Beyond the Horizon is Eoin’s second novel.
Colin Barrett
Colin Barrett is from Mayo, Ireland. His first book, Young Skins, was published in 2013. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian and The Stinging Fly magazine.
R.M. Clarke (Editor)
R.M. Clarke began her career as an actress in 2006, moving behind the scenes into voiceover work and writing some years later. Her short stories have been published in Losslit, The Open Pen Anthology and Dublin 2020, and she is a contributing writer to writing.ie. Her debut novel, The Glass Door, won the ‘Discovery’ award at the Dalkey Book Festival and The Irish Writers Centre Greenbean Novel Fair 2016. She lives in Dublin where she volunteers as an outreach speaker for the Rape Crisis Centre.
Mia Gallagher
Mia Gallagher is the author of two critically acclaimed novels: Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland (New Island, 2016), longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Award, and HellFire (Penguin Ireland, 2006), recipient of the Irish Tatler Literature Award. Her short fiction has been published widely, winning the START award in 2005 and shortlisted for Hennessy, Fish and Trevor/Bowen Awards.
‘All Bones’ was previously published in the 2003 Fish Anthology and as part of a limited edition chapbook You First (South Tipperary Arts Centre, 2005). Mia is the 2017 Farmleigh Writer-in-Residence and a contributing editor to The Stinging Fly. With the assistance of an Arts Council of Ireland bursary, she is currently working on a story collection, due for publication in 2018, and a new novel.
James Martyn Joyce
James Martyn Joyce is from Galway. His poetry collection, Shedding Skin, was published in 2010 and his short story collection, What’s Not Said, was published in 2012. He edited a collection of short stories, Noir by Noir West, in 2014.
His new collection of poetry, Furey, will be published by Doire Press in spring 2018.
Rosaleen McDonagh
Rosaleen McDonagh is a Traveller woman with a disability. She worked in Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre for ten years where she jointly managed the Violence Against Women programme. Her involvement in leading initiatives on Traveller women’s issues and Traveller health issues means that she is regarded as a leading feminist in both the Traveller and the disability community.
McDonagh’s work includes The Baby Doll Project, Stuck, She’s Not Mine, and Rings. Rings was performed at VAS in Washington in June 2010. McDonagh was shortlisted for the PJ O’ Connor Radio Play Awards 2010. While in the United States with Fishamble, Colum McCann, Booker Prize winner, gave her the rights to adapt his 2007 novel Zoli for stage. In March 2012, Beat Him Like a Badger was commissioned by Fishamble to be part of the Tiny Plays for Ireland series. Rosaleen was also commissioned for a feature article in The Irish Times in 2012 responding to Channel 4’s series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Irish Theatre Magazine also commissioned Cripping Up; Copping Out about Disability Arts in Ireland. Rosaleen has a Bachelor of Arts in Biblical and Theological Studies, an M.Phil in Ethnic and Racial Studies and an M.Phil in Creative Writing, all from Trinity College Dublin. She is currently a PhD candidate at Northumbria University. Her working title is ‘From Shame to Pride: The Politics of Traveller Identity’. Mainstream was produced by Project Arts Centre and directed by Jim Culleton (winner of the Olivier award as a director 2016). Rosaleen has served two terms on the NWCI and is an active board member. She was elected to Aosdána in March 2017 and is a board member of Project Arts Centre.
Pat McCabe
Pat McCabe was born in Clones, Co. Monaghan, Ireland in 1955.
He has had many novels published including The Dead School and The Butcher Boy.
His movies include The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, both of which were directed by Neil Jordan.
He is currently performing his ‘Analogue Monologue’ here and there about the place.
He is married, with two grown-up children, to the artist Margot Quinn, and is a member of Aosdána.
Alvy Carragher
Alvy’s first collection, Falling in Love with Broken Things, is available from Salmon Poetry. She was part of the 2016 Poetry Ireland Introduction Series, representing the series at a reading in New York. She graduated from the National University of Ireland Galway with a Masters in Writing and returned to mentor/teach the third-year poetry workshop (2016 and 2017). She is currently living and teaching in South Korea.
Claire Hennessy
Claire Hennessy is the author of several YA novels, most recently Nothing Tastes As Good and Like Other Girls. She is a co-founder and co-editor of Banshee literary journal, and also works as a creative writing facilitator, editor, speaker and book reviewer.
Lillian Alford Patterson
Lillian Alford Patterson is a writer from Mississippi, currently living between Dublin and New Orleans, Louisiana. She holds a Bachelors of Literature and Creative Writing from Bard College, and a Masters of Philosophy in Creative Writing from Trinity College. Lillian volunteers with Fighting Words while in Dublin and for Big Class while in New Orleans. While her literary focus has been in nonfiction, she is currently working on a novel about the people of New Orleans post-Katrina. This is her first piece published in Ireland.
