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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Applications are *CLOSED* for the Paul McVeigh Residency. Now in its third year, previous winners have gone on to get agents, book deals and win literary prizes.
The residency will take place near Glengariff, in its stunning forest park, West Cork, from Sunday 25th January until Sunday 1st February 2026. The opportunity is for emerging writers of fiction and non-fiction aged 21 and over living in Ireland and the UK.
What’s new this year? There are three places in total; two available in the cottage and one in the detached out building. Before applying please read the detailed description of the property below.
There is a £20 application fee which entitles ALL applicants to three professional development sessions:
An hour-long group zoom session on writing a query letter with Sam Blake and Maria McHale, Directors of Writers Ink.
An industry session by Writers and Artists Yearbook team on ‘How to Pitch Your Book’. This 30-minute session will look at ways to approach the challenge of summing up a whole book in so few words, discuss pitch research, and share examples of successful pitches that you can use as a model for your own. We’ll also discuss how pitches can differ depending on the kind of book you are writing (fiction genres, memoir and non-fiction), as well as how the pitch functions in the context of your submission package. The session will end with a brief Q&A, so come ready with your questions!
A 30 min group zoom session on reading your work live with actor Tony Flynn.
THE WINNERS
Pre Care:
The three writers will have an online session academic/author, Yvonne Battle-Felton, to discuss how to make the most of the residency.
Standard class travel provided.
Welcome
Anna Burtt and Paul McVeigh will greet the three winners to settle them into their accommodation and answer any questions. There will be a welcome dinner and drinks.
The winners will be taken on a trip to the beautiful harbour town of Bantry to visit Bantry Bookshop where they will get one-on-one reading recommendations, receive €50 book tokens to spend in-shop and a special gift from the shop.
There will be a trip to Cork city to meet literary festival director, Pat Cotter, to talk about the industry and the festival circuit.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner provided – family style. Basic tea and coffee provided. Alcohol, food outside of meals, special food items must be covered by the individual.
AFTERCARE
1. Anna Burtt will give each writer a half-hour publishing consultancy by zoom.
2. Pervious residency winner, Patrick Holloway, will give a group zoom session on his experience as a debut novelist – getting an agent and a publishing deal.
3. All three residency winners will also receive a copy of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook and a bundle of W&A Writing Companion Guides. They’ll receive a year’s free subscription to the Writers & Artists Listings Subscription (a digital database of publishing industry contacts), which also includes access to Agent Pages – individual profiles for over 500 literary agents – to help writers personalise their approaches when submitting to literary agents.
4. The winners will get membership for Writing.ie – a platform for the writing community filled with advice and resources.
Entry Eligibility & How to apply
Send an email to pmcveighresidency@gmail.com attaching 1000 word extract of your prose – fiction and non-fiction accepted. Include in the body of the email a short bio outlining your publication history, if any.
*We are not looking for poetry at this time, thank you.
2. You must be available on the full dates of the residency – no changes possible.
3. Applicants must be 21 or over at time of residency.
4. Please put in your subject heading UK, or Ireland (if on the island of Ireland).
5. You can have had some short works published but not a solo book. (Poetry pamphlet/collections and self-published excepted)
6. Deadline: 30 November 2025
7. Please attach proof of payment. If not available, please provide date and time of payment.
7. Judges are Cathy Galvin, Paul McVeigh and previous residency winner Hilary White.
Longlist announced Friday December 5th.
Shortlist announced Friday December 12th.
Winners announced Friday December 19th.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
The two bedrooms in the cottage are in its converted attic. Three important things to consider; firstly, the short staircase to the attic very study but steep. Secondly, the bedrooms are adjoining. Thirdly, there is only one toilet/shower for you both to share and it is downstairs.
If the stairs are off-putting, the ground floor has a daybed that extends into a double. The out building is single floored but there is a slight grass incline to access it.
You are out in the countryside in the middle of national park with beautiful scenery and walks. The nearest village is Glengariff, a 10-15 min drive, and not walkable. I will be staying nearby and will have a car for excursions etc.
PLEASE CONSIDER THE ABOVE CAREFULLY BEFORE APPLYING. Questions to pmcveighresidency@gmail.com
Paul McVeigh 