2024 Summer School
Open for applications: Tuesday March 12th to Tuesday April 2nd 2024
In-person Workshops
July 1st to July 5th 2024 at the Irish Writers Centre
10am to 4.30pm Monday to Friday
Fiction: Mia Gallagher
Creative Non-Fiction: Roisin Kiberd
Poetry: Annemarie Ní Churreáin
In-person workshops will take place in the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin.
Participants are responsible for organising their own travel and accommodation. In addition to the workshops, the programme will include a session with a visiting writer for each group, plus a Q&A with The Stinging Fly’s editors.
Online Workshops
July 8th to July 12th 2024 via Zoom
10am to 1pm Monday to Friday
Fiction: Cathy Sweeney
Creative Non-Fiction: Arnold Thomas Fanning
Poetry: Martina Evans
4pm to 7pm Monday to Friday
Fiction: Michael Magee
4pm to 8pm Monday to Thursday
Short Stories: Wendy Erskine
Afternoon events: In addition to the workshop schedule, we will have a strand of afternoon events from 2.15 to 3.45pm Wednesday to Friday for all groups. These will include talks by guest writers, plus a Q&A with the editors of The Stinging Fly. Attendance at the afternoon events is encouraged but not essential.
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The principal aim of the summer school programme is to allow people to develop their writing practice through intensive engagement with groups of similarly motivated individuals. Participating writers put forward two pieces of work-in-progress to be read and discussed within each workshop group.
The in-person workshops will have no more than 10 participants.
The online workshops will have no more than 6 participants in the fiction and non-fiction workshop groups. We can accommodate up to 10 participants in the poetry workshop group. Participants are expected to attend all of the workshop sessions.
We are also running a series of entry-level fiction workshops during the summer school for people who are new to writing. More information here.
To help you decide which workshop to apply for, workshop leaders have written up brief workshop descriptions, which are available to download here.
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Workshop places will be offered based on work submitted. All submissions will be read by the workshop group leaders.
We recommend that you submit material for the summer school that you have already worked on for some time. It should be work that is beyond the first-draft stage, but which you know you still need help with. The close attention your work receives during the workshops will be an opportunity for you to approach it again with fresh eyes.
Fiction Workshops
–Up to 1,000 words or first 3 pages from a work-in-progress with your application.
–Participants will then be invited to submit two pieces of work-in-progress, each being between ca. 2000 and ca. 6000 words. These can be: two stories; two extracts from a novel; a story AND a novel extract if you are attempting to write both. Please note: anyone applying for the workshop with Wendy Erskine should submit short stories only.
Creative Non-Fiction
–Up to 1,500 words or first 4 pages from a work-in-progress with your application and a 200 word synopsis of your essay or non-fiction manuscript.
–Participants will then be invited to submit two pieces of work-in-progress, each being between ca. 2000 and ca. 6000 words. These can be: two essays; two extracts from a non-fiction manuscript; an essay AND an extract if you are attempting to write both.
Poetry Workshops
–2 poems with your application.
–3 to 4 poems (a maximum of six pages) to be submitted after you’ve been offered a place.
Writers will be asked to submit their works-in-progress two weeks before the summer school begins. All of the work is then shared among the participants in each workshop and is to be read in advance.
Fees:
In-person Workshops (1 – 5 July)
The tuition fee for each workshop is €450.
The concession rate for anyone on low income is €300.
Online Workshops (8 – 12 July)
The tuition fee for each workshop is €375.
The concession rate for anyone on low income is €250.
Fees are payable only when a place has been offered and you have accepted the offer. We will ask for a deposit of €100 to be paid by Friday 10th May. Fees must be paid in full by Friday 7th June.
Free Places:
Thanks to the support we receive from the Arts Council and to the continued generosity of our patrons, we are in a position to offer eleven free places at the summer school, one in each workshop. These will be awarded to writers who are either unwaged or on low income. To be considered for a free place, all you need to do is follow the general guidelines below and tick the box on the submission form.
The Stinging Fly is open to submissions from writers of all backgrounds. We are committed to pursuing a proactive approach to diversity and inclusiveness. We strongly encourage writers from underrepresented areas of society to apply. If you are such a writer, we encourage you to join us. If you know such writers, please spread the word (with our thanks). And if you have any queries about this, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
To apply for a place:
Applications for places will be accepted via Submittable between Tuesday March 12th and Tuesday April 2nd.
Send us a sample of your work. We want to read 1,000 words of fiction or up to 1,500 words of creative non-fiction, as well as a 200 word synopsis, or 2 poems.
All applicants must supply a cover note with details of their current writing project(s). We will ask you to tell us which aspects of your writing you need most help with and why you want to take part in the summer school.
All submissions should ideally be in Word doc or docx format. Poets, please include both your poems in one document.
We will aim to send out offers of places no later than Tuesday 30th April. Participants will be asked to confirm their places and pay their deposits as soon as possible.
Follow this link to apply for one of the fiction workshops.
Follow this link to apply for one of the creative non-fiction workshops.
Follow this link to apply for one of the poetry workshops.
About our tutors:
Wendy Erskine (Short Stories | Online) is the author of two prize-winning short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move, published by The Stinging Fly Press and Picador. For PVA Books, she edited well I just kind of like it, an anthology of writing about art in the home. A frequent broadcaster, she had a show on Soho Radio for Rough Trade Books. In 2023 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2022 she was Seamus Heaney Fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her non-fiction has appeared widely. She is a full-time secondary school teacher.
Martina Evans (Poetry | Online) grew up in County Cork and trained in St Vincents Dublin as a radiographer before moving to London in 1988. She is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. Now We Can Talk Openly About Men (Carcanet 2018) was shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the Pigott Poetry Prize and the Roehampton Poetry Prize and was an Observer, TLS and Irish Times Book of the Year. American Mules, (Carcanet 2021) won the Pigott Poetry Prize in 2022 and was a TLS and Sunday Independent Book of the Year for 2021. The Coming Thing, a sequel to her narrative poem Petrol (2012) was published by Carcanet in 2023. She is an Irish Times poetry critic.
Arnold Thomas Fanning (Non-fiction | Online) has had work published in The Dublin Review, Banshee, gorse, The Lonely Crowd, The Stinging Fly, Correspondences: An Anthology to Call for an End to Direct Provision, Empty House: Poetry and Prose on the Climate Crisis, Show Your Work: Essays from The Dublin Review, & elsewhere. His work has also been frequently broadcast on radio, most recently for Keywords on RTÉ Radio 1. Mind on Fire: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery, was published in 2018 and shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2019.
Mia Gallagher (Fiction | In-person) is the author of the novels HellFire (Penguin Ireland, 2006) and Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland (New Island, 2016), the short-story collection Shift (New Island, 2018), and the bilingual Dubliners (2022, co-authored with artist Mario Sughi). She is a contributing editor of The Stinging Fly, and in 2018 was elected as a member of Aosdána. She has been mentoring fiction writers and facilitating workshops in creative writing since 2007.
Roisin Kiberd (Non-fiction | In-person) has written essays and features for the The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Winter Papers, The White Review, The Guardian and Vice, among other places. Her first book, The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2021. Roisin is a contributing editor of The Stinging Fly and lectures in creative writing at the University of Galway.
Cathy Sweeney (Fiction | Online) is a writer living in Wexford. Her collection of short stories, Modern Times, was published by The Stinging Fly Press and by W&N in 2020 . Her debut novel, Breakdown, was published by W&N in January 2024.
Annemarie Ní Churreáin (Poetry | In-person) is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her publications include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017), Town (The Salvage Press, 2018) and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021). A recipient of The Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award and a co-recipient of The Markievicz Award, she is the Guest Editor of Poetry Ireland Review Issue 140. Annemarie has received literary fellowships from the Jack Kerouac House in Florida and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany. She has delivered readings and workshops throughout Ireland, Europe and the US. In 2023 she is Writer in Residence at Reindhardt University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the poetry editor of The Stinging Fly. More info www.studiotwentyfive.com.
Michael Magee (Fiction | Online) is the fiction editor of the Tangerine and a graduate of the creative writing PhD programme at Queen’s University, Belfast. His writing has appeared in Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, The Lifeboat and The 32: The Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices. Close to Home is his first novel. It won the Rooney Prize for Literature 2023 and the Nero Debut Fiction Prize.