2025 Summer School
Open for applications: the deadline for applications for the creative non-fiction workshops has been extended until 5pm on Thursday April 10th 2023.
In-person Workshops
Monday June 30th to Friday July 4th 2025 at the Irish Writers Centre
10am to 4.30pm Monday to Friday
Entry-Level Fiction: Sheila Armstrong and Olivia Fitzsimons
Creative Non-Fiction: Róisín Kiberd
Fiction: Mia Gallagher – Applications are closed
Poetry: Moya Cannon – Applications are closed
Online Workshops
Monday July 7th to Friday July 11th 2025 via Zoom
10am to 1pm Monday to Friday
Entry-Level Fiction: Maame Blue
Creative Non-Fiction: Arnold Thomas Fanning
Fiction: Cathy Sweeney – Applications are closed
Fiction: Rob Doyle – Applications are closed
4pm to 7pm Monday to Friday
Entry-Level Fiction: Danielle McLaughlin
Fiction: Michael Magee – Applications are closed
Fiction: Mary O’Donoghue – Applications are closed
Fiction: Ross Raisin – Applications are closed
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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To help you decide which workshop to apply for, our workshop leaders have written up brief workshop descriptions, which are available to download here.
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You can watch back the 2025 Summer School General Information Clinic here.
You can watch back the 2025 Summer School Information Clinic for Entry-Level Fiction here.
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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.
More information on the entry-level fiction workshops is available 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.
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 (30 June – 4 July)
The tuition fee for each workshop is €450.
The concession rate for anyone on low income is €300.
Online Workshops (7 – 11 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 thirteen 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:
The deadline for applications to the creative non-fictions workshops has been extended to 5pm on Thursday April 10th 2023.
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.
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:
Rob Doyle (Fiction | Online) was born in Dublin. His third book, Threshold, was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury, and was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Doyle’s debut novel, Here are the Young Men, was published in 2014 by Bloomsbury and the Lilliput Press. It was selected as one of Hot Press magazine’s ‘20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016’, and has been made into a film starring Dean Charles Chapman and Anya Taylor Joy. This is the Ritual, a collection of short stories, was published in 2016 to widespread acclaim. Rob Doyle is the editor of the anthology The Other Irish Tradition (Dalkey Archive Press), and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep (Broken Dimanche Press). He has written for the New York Times, TLS, Sunday Times, Dublin Review, Observer and many other publications, and throughout 2019 he wrote a weekly column on cult books for the Irish Times. His book, Autobibliography, was published in 2021.
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.
Moya Cannon (Poetry | In-person) is an Irish poet with six previous collections. In 2021 Carcanet Press published her Collected Poems. She was brought up in an Irish speaking family in Dunfanaghy, Co Donegal. She received a BA in History and Politics from University College, Dublin and an MPhil in International Relations from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. A recipient of the inaugural Brendan Behan Award and the O’Shaughnessy Award, she was Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University, Philadelphia. Her work has been widely anthologised and translated.
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.
Ross Raisin (Fiction | Online) is the author of four novels: A Hunger (2022), A Natural (2017), Waterline (2011) and God’s Own Country (2008). His work has won and been shortlisted for twelve literary awards, including winning the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award and the BBC National Short Story Award. In 2013, he was named on Granta’s once-a-decade Best of Young British Novelists list. In 2018 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Royal Society of Literature. In 2018, Ross published a book for the Read This series, on the practice of fiction writing. As a tutor, he worked for the Guardian Masterclass programme, teaching a 6-week fiction course; he teaches at the University of Leeds, and also works as a writing mentor and, as a writer-in-residence, for the education charity First Story. Find more on Ross, his books and teaching here: www.rossraisin.com
Mary O’Donoghue (Fiction | Online) grew up in County Clare. Her first short story collection, The Hour After Happy Hour, was published by The Stinging Fly Press in 2023. She has published poetry collections with Salmon Poetry and Dedalus Press and translations in dual-language volumes from Cló Iar-Chonnacht, Bloodaxe Books, and Yale University Press. Her novel Before the House Burns was published by Lilliput Press in 2010. She is senior fiction editor at the US literary magazine AGNI.