Paul McVeigh Residency

Patrick Cotter Joins Paul McVeigh Residency

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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.

Patrick Holloway & Hilary White Join The Residency

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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.

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne Joins Paul McVeigh Residency

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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.

Martina Devlin First Paul McVeigh Residency Mentor

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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.