The winners of the Paul McVeigh West Cork Residency are Carol Farrelly, Greg Thorpe and @tephanie Torrance. Thank you to the judges Cathy Galvin and Hilary White who had an extremely difficult job.
The winners will work with Yvonne Battle-Felton, Louis de Bernieres, Martina Devlin, Patrick Holloway, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Kirsty Logan, Robert Olen Butler, Leone Ross and visit Bantry Bookshop and Patrick Cotter in Cork.
ALL APPLICANTS WILL GET THREE FREE EVENTS IN JANUARY AND MORE ON THAT AFTER CHRISTMAS.
Delighted that my Sunday Miscellany story, ‘Queen of the South’, has made it into print with this wonderful anthology edited by producer Sarah Binchy. Can’t wait to go through this and read all the stories from some of my favourite writers.
We’re delighted that Patrick Cotter has joined the residency. The three winners will go to Cork to meet with Patrick where they can ask him about the industry. Patrick is Director of Munster Literature Centre and Cork International Short Story Festival and has invaluable advice about approaching festivals and what’s expected of you when you’re there.
Patrick Cotter has published many books of poetry, most recently Quality Control at the Miracle Factory (Dedalus, 2025). He is a recipient of the Keats-Shelly Poetry Prize and has been short-listed for many others. His poems have been translated into twenty languages. His poems have been published in the Financial Times, London Review of Books, Poetry and over twenty anthologies. He lives in Cork.
For more info on the Paul McVeigh West Cork Residency click here.
What a relief! I’m very lucky to have received an Arts Council NI grant to fund my writing.
I applied through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Project Funding for Individuals Programme for time to write a new collection of stories.
I’m very grateful for the support for my writing but as most writers struggle with their finances it makes such a huge difference to the financial stress.
Both winners of the inaugural Paul McVeigh Residency are back this year.
Patrick Holloway will talk to the winners about life after the residency and how to prepare for your first book entering the world. Hilary White will help judge who gets the three places this year. Here’s more about them.
Patrick Holloway is a writer of fiction and poetry, and won The Bath Short Story Prize, The Allingham Fiction Contest, The Flash 500 Prize, The Molly Keane Creative Writing Prize, among others. His debut novel, The Language of Remembering, was published in 2025 and was described as The Irish Times as ‘an utterly readable book of real depth,’ the Irish Independent as ‘modern Irish writing at its finest’, and The Irish examiner as a ‘powerful, original family story from a wonderfully talented writer.’ It was listed in RTE’s top 10 books of 2025. His work appears in The Stinging Fly, The Moth, The London Magazine, Carve, Southword, among others.
Hilary White is a writer and conservationist from Dublin. His work has appeared in The Dublin Review, Winter Papers, Tolka, Archaeology Ireland, Sunday and Irish Independents, and the Irish Times. He is currently completing City of Hawks, a memoir about Dublin and its raptors. He was chosen for the inaugural Paul McVeigh Residency 2023, and long-listed for the 2024 Nature Chronicles Prize. Hilary is a recipient of the Literature Bursary and Agility awards from the Arts Council of Ireland.
I’m over-the-moon that ‘I Hear You’ has sold out its initial print run. This is particularly great as short stories famously don’t sell well. So, thanks to everyone who bought a copy!
It looks the same with the addition of some new quotes from BBC Radio 4, Bookmunch, RTE, and The Irish Times.
Yvonne Battle-Felton joins the Paul McVeigh West Cork Residency where she will talk to the three winners in advance of their stay to help them get the best from the residency.
Battle-Felton is an award-winning author, academic, editor, podcaster, host, creative producer, and writer. Her debut, Remembered (Dialogue Books, Blackstone Publishing) was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2019) and shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize (2020). Yvonne has six titles in Penguin Random House’s The Ladybird series. Yvonne is former Senior Commissioning Editor at Hachette’s John Murray Press and is the Academic Director of Creative Writing at Cambridge University. Winner of The Shirley Jackson Award (novel), Curdle Creek (2024 Dialogue Books, Henry Holt), a gothic horror inspired by Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, is her second novel. Yvonne is a finalist in the Hurston Wright Foundation Zora Award for Fiction and is lover of stories in all of their forms.
The final mentor for the Paul McVeigh West Cork Residency is the incredible Robert Olen Butler.
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels and six volumes of short fiction including A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has also published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream. In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. His works have been translated into twenty-one languages.
More information on the residency is found here and will launch Friday October 31st.
Paul McVeigh 