I’m looking forward to teaching at the inaugural Look North Festival in Belfast. If you fancy coming along here’s the details.
“Over the weekend you will attend a Short Story workshop from 10am – 12 noon on Friday 25th, Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th February.
You will find out what competition judges, anthology and journal editors look for in a short story. You will get tips on where to start the action, how to grab the reader, along with opportunities for submission, how to find them and where you should be sending your stories.
Paul McVeigh is a writer, author and performer. His novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Novel Award and the McCrea Literary Award. He is the Editor of three anthologies, including, 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices, (Unbound), published in 2021.”
“The ninth Bath Short Story Award is open for entries now and will close on Monday, April 11th at midnight BST. We welcome stories of up to 2200 words on any subject or theme from anywhere in the world. Before entering, please check the rules for more details. This year, the competition is judged by novelist, short story writer, playwright and writing teacher, Paul McVeigh who has judged many short story awards. Read our interview with him to find out more about him and what he looks for in a short story. The longlist and shortlist for the 2022 Award is likely to be announced in July 2022 and the winners by August 2022.
Prizes as follows: £1200, first prize £300, second prize £100, third prize £100, the Acorn Award for an unpublished writer of fiction. £50 in book vouchers for the local prize, donated by Mr B’s Emporium of Books, Bath.
Entries: £9.00 each, online only. Word limit: 2200.
We look forward to reading your stories. NB. We are not accepting simultaneous submissions this year. Thanks.”
I’m honoured to have been invited to co-curate Birmingham Literature Festival this year. Here’s what they are saying over at their website…
“Birmingham Literature Festival, which will run 6-9 October 2022, has today announced that Casey Bailey, Paul McVeigh and Otegha Uwagba will join the team as Guest Curators for this year.
With interests including poetry, politics, performance, journalism, short stories and education, the three Guest Curators bring an enormous range of creativity to the 2022 Birmingham Literature Festival.
As Guest Curators, Casey, Paul and Otegha will work alongside the Birmingham Literature Festival team to programme events which interest them personally, or speak to their areas of expertise and experience.”
I’ve always loved Christmas. I love short stories. To write a short story to be aired on Christmas Day on BBC Radio 4 is such an honour. I can’t imagine anything in my career matching the buzz of being part of the Christmas Day schedule. That I can write a story about a gay man to go out on Christmas Day feels like such a moment too.
Thanks to producer Michael Shannon for commissioning me and Bill Maul on sound.
You can check it out here. I hope you can tune in or listen after on BBC iPlayer.
Join Dublin Book Festival for an evening of delving into Queer Love: An Anthlogy of Irish Fiction (Munster Literature). The anthology was conceived as an attempt to redress the lack of acknowledgement of LGBTQIA+ community and representation in Irish literary anthologies. At this online event, editor of the collection Paul McVeigh is joined by two of its contributors, Emma Donoghue and Neil Hegarty to discuss their contributions to the anthology, the importance of producing this anthology, and developing LGBTQIA+ presence and representation in the Irish literary community.
I was commissioned by the Northern Ireland office in Brussels to write a three minute story for their Summer Postcard Series. There’s many other great stories from N Ireland’s finest writers.
Lucy Caldwell is the author of two short story collections, several stage plays and radio dramas, and four novels, including the forthcoming These Days (Faber, March 2022). She is also the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber, 2019). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a former Fellow of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast, awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her most recent collection Intimacies was described by Kevin Barry as “A tremendous collection. Precise and beautifully controlled fictions but with strange, wild energies pulsing along just below their surface,” and by Derry Girls writer Lisa McGee as “Heart-stoppingly good.” She was named by the Sunday Times as “one of Ireland’s most essential writers.”
Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. Her first novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, was published in 2014 to critical acclaim, followed by a short-story collection, Children’s Children(2016), and two flash fiction anthologies, Postcard Stories (2017) and Postcard Stories 2 (2020). Her second novel, The Fire Starters (2019), won the EU Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the Dalkey Novel of the Year Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She has won the Harper’s Bazaar short-story competition and has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award and the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize. She specializes in running arts projects and events with older people, especially those living with dementia.
Paul McVeigh‘s debut novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Novel Prize and The McCrea Literary Award and was shortlisted for many others including the Prix du Roman Cezam in France. His short stories have been read on BBC Radio 3, 4 & 5 and on Sky Arts. They have appeared in print in journals such as The Stinging Fly, and numerous anthologies including Faber’s Being Various: New Irish Short Stories and The Art of the Glimpse. He is associate director of Word Factory, ‘the UK’s national organisation for excellence in the short story’ (The Guardian), and he co-founded the London Short Story Festival. He was co-editor of the Belfast Storiesanthology and was fiction editor at Southword Journal. He edited The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Writers, which includes new work by Kevin Barry, Roddy Doyle and Lisa McInerney.
Paul McVeigh 