An Arrow in Flight: Introducing Short Story Week and a giveaway!

Ireland has produced some of the world’s most celebrated short story writers – and continues to do so. Why are the Irish so good at the form, and why do they love it so much?

Ireland’s history with the short story form is well documented. James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, Maeve Brennan, William Trevor and Mary Lavin are just some of a long list of internationally recognised writers.

For Frank O’Connor, whose study of the short story – The Lonely Voice – is considered a seminal work, the Irish are successful as writers of the short story because the best short stories focus on ‘submerged groups’ – marginalised people who live at the fringes of society and have no effective voice.

His main theory is that this submerged population changes its character from writer to writer, from generation to generation. It may be Gogol’s officials; Turgenev’s serfs…

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John Hewitt Summer School 2017

wonderful report from a wonderful week

Jan Carson Writes

Another week, another book festival. Another twelve hour stopover in my own house. Another frantic scramble to find enough clean socks to make it through ’til Friday. Another futile attempt to coerce my plants back to life with a half-hearted weekly water. Another scenic run up the M1. Another attempt to pre-think exactly which short story collections I will want to refer to in my workshops which inevitably ends in brain muddle and the decision to just bring all the books in the world with me anyway. Inevitably I will cart all the books in the world about in Tesco bags for life, (bag for lives?), for the duration of the week, putting my shoulder out and never once referring to any of them, all the time quietly confident that if a question about Bridget Jones’ Diary or Faulkner or The Da Vinci Code were to come up, I’d be…

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