irish writing

It started in Hospital: My Writing Life Francesco Pacifico, a novelist based in Rome, wrote Coronavirus Dispatches for the New York literary magazine, n+1. Number eight in the series was entitled A Breakup Letter to my Writing…

Is love a practice or a place?  And where does it go, when it comes?   "Paco came from the sea," she said.  It was all she had ever said. Long before the wind was captured.  Before a word was ever spoken.  Before darkness became…

Being taken on by a high profile literary agency should have been the start of Hazel Gaynor's career, but unfortunately they couldn’t place her Titanic novel The Girl Who Came Home. With the Titanic anniversary rapidly approaching, Hazel…

Skin is stronger where it has ruptured. I tore during labour but didn’t feel the stitches—my body produced anaesthetic, a response to pain.  Now, there is a small, silvery scar. Like braille, you said, your fingers tracing, eyes on…

I finished reading Joseph O’Neill’s Good Trouble last week and had said at the time that it was very unusual for me to be able to sit down and read a book of short stories from start to finish in the order that they were ordered.…

“It is a tremendously Hibernian dilemma—a broken family, lost love, all the melancholy rest of it—and a Hibernian easement for it is suggested: fuck it, we’ll go for an old drink.” There is perhaps no better conspectus or cure for the…

There are the celebrated authors: Checkov, Joyce, Mansfield, Munro. There are the big questions: “what makes a truly great short story?”. “Where does the form originate?” “What can short stories do that other forms of literature can’t?”…

‘I always think of the voices that don’t get amplified in society.’ Sorcha Fox is a multitalented performer, actor, writer, director and poet who has written a poetic sequence called Remember that invites her audience to remember their…

News International Literature Festival Dublin This year's ILFD wrapped up on the 29th May. This year's event had some huge names, such as Ruby Wax, Paula Meehan, Colm Tóibín, Richard Ford and Werner Herzog, as well as our very own…

I find it apt that it was a brilliantly bright, shining day when I met Molly McCloskey. I had finished her newest novel When Light is Like Water the previous week, and had just written a review of it. On the journey to meet her I was …