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.
Thanks again ACNI and National Lottery.
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.
You can apply here.
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.
You can pick up your copy here.
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.
Photo Credit: Marat Battle
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.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is currently the Laureate for Irish Fiction. She has worked in the Department of Irish Folklore in UCD, and for many years as a curator in the National Library of Ireland. Also a teacher of Creative Writing, she has been Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and Writer Fellow at UCD. She is a member of Aosdána since 2004, an ambassador for the Irish Writers’ Centre, and President of the Folklore of Ireland Society (An Cumann le Béaloideas Éireann). Ní Dhuibhne was the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College.
Author of more than thirty books, she has published seven collections of short stories. Her most recent books are Twelve Thousand Days: A Memoir (shortlisted for the Michel Déon Award 2020) and Little Red and Other Stories (Blackstaff 2020), Selected Stories (Blackstaff 2023), Fáínne Geal and Lae (Clo Iar Chonnacht 2023), Look! It’s a Woman Writer! (Arlen House, 2021), and Well! You Don’t Look It! Essays by Irish women writers on Ageing (Salmon 2024).
She has been the recipient of many literary awards, most recently the Pen Award for an Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature, and a Hennessy Hall of Fame Award, many Oireachtas Awards for her writing in Irish, and the Stuart Parker Award for Drama. Her novel, The Dancers Dancing, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2000. In addition to her fiction and drama, she has written many scholarly articles on folklore and literary topics, and is a regular book reviewer for The Irish Times.
What lucky winners.
More information on the residency is coming soon with a little more found here.
Leone Ross has joined the residency team. Leone is a master at writing sex and sensuality and she will pass on her wisdom to the residency winners.
Leone Ross is a three-time novelist, short story writer and editor. Her fiction has been nominated for the Women’s Prize, the Goldsmiths award, the RSL Ondaatje award, and the Edge Hill Prize, among others. In 2022, she won the Manchester Prize for Fiction for a single short story. The Guardian has praised her ‘searing empathy’ and the Times Literary Supplement called her ‘a pointilliste, a master of detail…’ Ross has taught creative writing for 30+ years. She has been a judge in the short story category for the Bridport Prize, Mslexia magazine and the VS Pritchett Award.
Her third novel, This One Sky Day aka Popisho was published in 2021 [Faber & Faber]. She is the editor of Glimpse: A Black British Anthology of Speculative Fiction, published in 2022 [Peepal Tree Press]. Ross is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
More information on the residency is coming soon with a little more found here.
The Residency is lucky to have the wonderful Kirsty Logan join as one of the mentors. I met Kirsty at a wonderful event on the short story for BBC Radio 3 (alongside George Saunders) and we met again recently at Cork International Short Story Festival.
Kirsty Logan’s latest books are the story collection No & Other Love Stories and the memoir The Unfamiliar: A Queer Motherhood Memoir. She is also the author of three novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists, and around 300 short stories. Her books have won the Lambda, Polari, Saboteur, Scott and Gavin Wallace awards. Her work has been optioned for TV, developed for film, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. She is currently collaborating on several projects across film, TV, collaborative chapbooks, and performance.
More information on the residency is coming soon with a little more found here.
Louis de Bernières was selected as one of Granta’s 20 Best of Young British Novelists. His historical novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book, has been translated into 11 languages and was made into a Hollywood movie. He has written two short story collections, Notwithstanding (2009), and Labels (2019). His book Red Dog was adapted as a film of the same name in Australia in 2011. He has also written four poetry collections.
The three winners of the residency will have an hour session with him answering all there questions on craft. More information on the residency is coming soon with a little more found here.
Delighted to announce that Dr Martina Devlin is the first mentor on the 2026 Paul McVeigh Residency.
Dr Martina Devlin is an author and newspaper columnist. She has written nine novels, two non-fiction books and a collection of short stories. Her latest novel, Charlotte is about Charlotte Brontë. Others include The House Where It Happened about a 1711 witchcraft trial which led to a plaque commemorating those wrongly convicted, following a campaign she initiated.
She has had two plays performed: Call Me Madame about Countess Marcievicz and Curves of Emotion about Nora Barnacle’s influence on James Joyce. Prizes include the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize and a Hennessy Literary Award.
Martina writes a weekly current affairs column for the Irish Independent, for which she has been named National Newspapers of Ireland commentator of the year, among other journalism prizes. She has programmed many current affairs and literary events. She holds a PhD in literary practice from Trinity College Dublin, and has lectured there and elsewhere on Irish literature.
More information on the residency is coming soon with a little more found here.
Paul McVeigh 