2026 Summer School
This year’s summer school offering includes one week of in-person fiction workshops and a second week with online workshops in fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry.
Our in-person summer school will run from Monday 29th June to Friday 3rd July at the Irish Writers Centre. Forty places will be available across four fiction workshop groups.
The online summer school will run from Monday 6th July to Friday 10th July with all sessions held on Zoom. The online school will include four fiction groups (up to 32 places) as well as two groups for creative non-fiction (16 places) and two groups for poetry (20 places).
Applications for the 2026 Summer School are now closed.
In-person Workshops
Monday June 29th to Friday July 3rd at the Irish Writers Centre
10am to 4.30pm Monday to Friday
Fiction: Jan Carson | Oisin Fagan | Mia Gallagher | Cathy Sweeney
Online Workshops
Monday July 6th to Friday July 10th via Zoom
10am to 1pm Monday to Friday
Fiction: Jarred McGinnis | Danielle McLaughlin
Creative Non-Fiction: Arnold Thomas Fanning
Poetry: Martina Evans
4pm to 7pm Monday to Friday
Fiction: Maame Blue | Rob Doyle
Creative Non-Fiction: Roisin Kiberd
Poetry: Stephen Sexton
*
A recording of our online information session for those applying to the 2026 summer school is available to watch back here.
*
The summer school programme aims to help people develop their writing practice through engagement with groups of similarly motivated individuals and to introduce people to different approaches to the craft of writing. Participating writers – after they’ve been offered a place – will be asked to submit work-in-progress which will be shared and read by their workshop group in advance of the workshop.
The in-person workshops will have no more than 10 participants. These fiction workshops will run from 10.00 until 16.30 each day with an hour for lunch.
During the first half of the day (10.00 – 13.00) participants will have their works-in-progress workshopped by the group.
During the second half of the day (14.00 – 16.30) participants from all of the workshop groups will come together to attend a series of craft talks and in-conversation events. These events are intended to allow participants an opportunity to meet and learn from a variety of working writers and to explore the underlying challenges they experience in moving forward with their work.
The online workshops will have no more than 8 participants in the fiction and non-fiction workshop groups. We can accommodate up to 10 participants in the poetry workshop group. Online workshops will run in the morning (10.00 – 13.00) and afternoon (16.00 – 19.00) during which participants will have their writing workshopped by the group.
Participants are expected to attend all of the workshop sessions.
*
Workshop places will be offered based on work submitted. All applications 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 1,500 words or first 3-4 pages from a work-in-progress with your application.
–Writers who are offered a place will then be invited to submit one piece of work-in-progress, between ca. 2000 and ca. 6000 words. This can be a story or an extract from a longer work.
Creative Non-Fiction
–Up to 1,500 words or first 3-4 pages from a work-in-progress with your application and a 200 word synopsis of your essay or non-fiction manuscript.
–Writers who are offered a place will then be invited to submit one piece of work-in-progress between ca. 2000 and ca. 6000 words. This can be an essay or an extract from a non-fiction manuscript.
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 work-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 (29 June – 3 July)
The tuition fee for each workshop is €450.
The concession rate for anyone on low income is €300.
Online Workshops (6 – 10 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 5th June.
Free Places:
Thanks to the funding support we receive from the Arts Council and to the continued generosity of our friends, we are in a position to offer twelve 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.
This year, thanks to a donation we’ve received, we are in a position to offer an additional two free places for writers from a socioeconomically disadvantaged background and who are of MENA/SWANA heritage. To be considered for one of these additional places, please tick the box provided 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:
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 29th April. Participants will be asked to confirm their places and pay their deposits as soon as possible.
About our workshop leaders:
Fiction (In-person):
Jan Carson is a Belfast based writer who has published four novels, three short story
collections and two micro-fiction collections. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize
for Literature for Ireland, 2019. The Raptures was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of
the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her writing has aired on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and
RTE and has been translated into twenty languages worldwide. Jan was the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast in 2025 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her latest novel, Few and Far Between will be published in April 2026.
Oisin Fagan is the author of Hostages, and Nobber, which was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Prize, and was named a Book of the Year by The Guardian and The Daily Mail. His novel, Eden’s Shore, was published by John Murray Press in April, 2025.
Mia Gallagher 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.
Cathy Sweeney has published fiction and personal essays in various magazines including The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Winter Pages and Granta. 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 2024. Her second novel, The Villa, is forthcoming with W&N in 2028.
Fiction (Online):
Maame Blue is the author of two novels; Bad Love, which won the 2021 Betty Trask award, and The Rest Of You, shortlisted for the 2025 Jhalak Prose Prize. Her short stories have appeared in four anthologies, including most recently in Be Gay, Do Crime. She has written for multiple publications such as The Independent, Writers Mosaic, Refinery29 and The Bookseller, and she regularly mentors emerging writers working on their debut novels. She also works as an editor and teaches creative writing for multiple organisations in Australia and the UK including Kill Your Darlings, Writing New South Wales, Curtis Brown Creative and Writers Victoria. She is based in Melbourne.
Rob Doyle was born in Dublin. He has written for The Irish Times, New York Times, TLS, Sunday Times, The Dublin Review, Observer and many other publications. His debut novel, Here are the Young Men, was published in 2014 by Bloomsbury and the Lilliput Press. This is the Ritual, a collection of short stories, was published in 2016. Threshold, Rob’s third book, followed in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. His latest novel, Cameo, was published in early 2026.
Jarred McGinnis was chosen by the Guardian as one of the UK’s ten best emerging writers. His debut novel, The Coward, was selected for BBC 2’s Between the Covers, BBC Radio 2’s Book Club and listed for the Barbellion Prize. The French edition won the First Novel Prize and was selected for the prestigious Femina prize. He is the winner of the 2023 Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award. His second novel, There is No Meant to Be, has just been published by Harvill.
Danielle McLaughlin is the author of the short-story collection, Dinosaurs on Other Planets, and the novel, The Art of Falling, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. She has been Writer in Residence at University College Cork and Visiting Writer Fellow at the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College, Dublin. She has also designed and delivered workshops in Creative Writing for various organisations and festivals and currently mentors a number of emerging writers. Her novel Rituals will be published by The Stinging Fly Press in April 2026.
Creative Non-fiction (Online):
Arnold Thomas Fanning has had work published in Banshee, gorse, The Lonely Crowd, The
Stinging Fly, Show Your Work: Essays from The Dublin Review, and An Asylum for My
Affections: Sketches of Maeve Brennan. He was Arts Council Writer in Residence, University
of Galway, Writer in Residence for Carlow County Council Arts Office, and taught Life
Writing for The Lantern Project in Nano Nagle Place in Cork City. His book, Mind on Fire: A
Memoir of Madness and Recovery, was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Newcomer of
the Year and the Wellcome Book Prize.
Roisin Kiberd has written essays and features for 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.
Poetry (Online):
Martina Evans is an Irish poet and novelist. She grew up in County Cork and is the author of thirteen books of prose and poetry.American Mules (2021) won the Pigott Poetry Prize and The Coming Thing (2023) was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize and PEN/Heaney Prize. Drunken Driving – a PBS Summer Choice – will be published by Carcanet in June. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and reviews poetry for the Irish Times.
Stephen Sexton is the author of two books of poems: If All the World and Love Were Young (2019), winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and Cheryl’s Destinies (2021). In 2020, he was awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast.