Lynsey May lives, loves and writes in Edinburgh. Her fiction has won her a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2013, a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2015 and a spot as Cove Park’s Emerging Scottish Writer in 2016.

Mícheál McCann is from Derry. His poems appear in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee and elsewhere. He is featured on Poetry Ireland Introductions 2020, and his first pamphlet of poems is forthcoming from Green Bottle Press in 2020.

M.W. Bewick’s first collection of poetry, Scarecrow, was published in 2017. He is the co-founder of independent publishing house Dunlin Press and an organiser at Poetrywivenhoe in Essex, where he lives. Publication credits include London Grip, The Sentinel Literary Quarterly and The Interpreter’s House.

Madeleine O’Callaghan was born and educated in Ireland. She now lives and works in Cambridge in the East of England. Her writing in prose and poetry has been published in England and the United States.

Maeve Brennan (1917-1993) moved with her family from Dublin to Washington DC in 1934 when her father was appointed as the Irish Free State’s first minister to the US. In 1949 she became a staff writer at The New Yorker, contributing book reviews, articles on fashion, and Talk of the Town pieces under the pseudonym ‘The Long-Winded Lady’. She began publishing short stories in the magazine in 1950. Her first collection of stories, In and Out of Never-Never Land, came out in 1969, as did a collection of the ‘Long-Winded Lady’ essays. A second collection of stories, Christmas Eve, was published in 1974. Neither story collection was published outside the US during Maeve’s lifetime.

Maeve O’Lynn completed her PhD on Gender and Genre in NI Fiction at Ulster
University in 2011. As a writer and researcher, her primary interests have been liminality, transition, horror, gender and the unheimlich. Maeve has published
work in Fortnight, Estudios Irlandeses and The Honest Ulsterman. She began
collaborating on The Xenophon Project with visual artist Siobhán McGibbon in
summer 2015; they are currently working on phase two.

Maggie Armstrong is a writer from Dublin. Her fiction has been published in ‘The Dublin Review’ and Fallow Media. This is her first essay for ‘The Stinging Fly’.

Maggie Breen’s debut collection of poetry, Other Things I Didn’t Tell, was published in 2013. Shortlisted for the Listowel Single Poem Prize in 2016, she has been published in The Stony Thursday, Crannóg & Southword,among others. She was guest editor for The Scaldy Detail 2013. Her radio documentary ‘Murt’s Eggs’ was broadcast on RTE Radio One in 2014. Originally from Wexford, she lives in Dingle, Co. Kerry.

Maggie O’Dwyer’s first poetry collection, Laughter Heard from the Road, was published by Templar Poetry in 2009 and was shortlisted for the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award. She is a member of Thornfield Poets.

Magi Gibson is a Scottish poet. She has published two books and one pamphlet of poetry. Her next publication, Wild Women of a Certain Age, is due later this year. She is currently Writer-in-Residence for Aberdeenshire.

Máighréad Medbh has seven published poetry collections and is known for dramatic readings. A prose work, Savage Solitude, was published in 2013. Winner of the Listowel Single Poem competition in 2016, she has three enovels online www.maighreadmedbh.ie

Maile Chapman’s stories have appeared in The Dublin Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and the online journal 5_trope, among others. She has a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Syracuse University and is a former Fulbright Grantee in Creative Writing. She lives in County Wexford with her husband, the songwriter Darren Byrne, and is finishing a novel.

Mairéad Irish lives in Dublin. Her stories have been published in Ireland, England and Canada, and broadcast on RTE and BBC radio.

Lois Kapila is the managing editor and a reporter with Dublin Inquirer. She has worked as a journalist in the US and India.

Lorcán Black is an Irish poet, now living in London. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Fjord’s Review, Blue Lyra Review, Apogee, Assaracus, The Flexible Persona and The Chiron Review, amongst numerous others. He is founder and Editor in Chief of Anomaly Literary Journal.

Loretta Kennedy was born in Mayo in 1973 and now lives in Galway. Her poems have appeared in Apostasy Mag, Glor Achadh Mór and The Burning Bush.

Lorna Shaugnessy has published three poetry collections, Torching the Brown River, Witness Trees and Anchored (Salmon Poetry), and a chapbook, Song of the Forgotten Shulamite (Lapwing). Her work was selected for the Forward Book of Poetry, 2009. She is also a translator of Spanish and South American Poetry. Her most recent translation was of poetry by Galician writer Manuel Rivas, The Disappearance of Snow (Shearsman Press).

Lorraine McColgan is from Dublin. She participated in this year’s Poetry Ireland Introductions Series at the Winding Stair. She has not been published before.

Lou Wilford lives in South Yorkshire where she is currently working as a private tutor and freelance writer, and studying for a BSc in Psychology. She has had work published in many poetry magazines including The Stinging Fly, Agenda, The Coffee Room, Iota, OWP, Equinox, Staple and Aspire. She has been shortlisted twice for the Bridport Prize and once for the Templar Poets anthology competition. She is working on a fantasy novel.

Louis de Paor’s ‘Rogha Dánta’ has just been published by Coiscéim and contains poems from seven collections in Irish published between 1988 and 2010.

Louis Mulcahy’s poems are in many anthologies and have been broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and Lyric FM and included on a shortlist of five for the Listowel Collection Competition 2008. As a potter, he recently received an Honorary Doctorate from N.U.I. for his artistry and his contribution to his community.

Louise C. Callaghan was born in Shankill, Co. Dublin in 1948. Her poetry collection, The Puzzle-Heart, is published by Salmon (1999). Forgotten Light: An Anthology of
Memory Poems, compiled and edited by her, is due from A & A Farmar.

Louise Hegarty has had work published in Banshee, The Tangerine, and The Dublin Review. Recently, she had a short story featured on BBC Radio 4’s Short Works. She lives in Cork.

Louise Kennedy’s stories have featured in Ambit, Wasifiri and The Incubator and on Arena on RTÉ Radio 1. Prizes include Listowel-Los Gatos, Short Fiction Journal and John O’Connor in 2016. She grew up in Holywood, County Down, and lives in Sligo.

Louise Nealon is a writer from County Kildare. She studied English literature in Trinity College Dublin, and then completed a Masters in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast in 2016. In 2017, she won the Seán Ó’Faoláin International Short Story Competition. She has been published both online and in print in The Irish Times and Southword. She currently lives on her family’s farm where she divides her time between reading, writing and milking cows.

Louise Wilford has had poems and short stories published in a range of journals including Agenda, Assent, Staple, Iota and South. She has also won several competitions and is regularly shortlisted. She is halfway through an MA in Writing and is currently working on a fantasy novel. She teaches A-levels to pay the bills.

Lucy Caldwell is a novelist and playwright. Her debut collection of short stories, Multitudes, was published by Faber & Faber in 2016. Awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award, the Imison Award, a Fiction Uncovered Award, a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth Writers’ Award (Canada & Europe).

Lucy Dougan has published two poetry collections: Memory Shell (Five Islands Press, 1998) and White Clay (Giramondo, 2008). She lives in Perth, Western Australia, and has just completed a PhD on representations of the city of Naples.

Lucy Luck is a literary agent based in London. She worked for Rogers, Coleridge and White agency for eight years before setting up Lucy Luck Associates in 2006. Her list of authors includes Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Adam Thorpe, Catherine O’Flynn and Kevin Barry. www.lucyluck.com