This site is a road map to the world of creative writing at UCC. The School of English offers creative writing at undergraduate, Masters and PhD level. See what we do – check out our blog written by students, see the major names in literature who visit our campus, and explore the numerous courses we offer that redefine and broaden what it is to be a 21st century creative writer.
News and Events
Resident Writers take the stage
Our final reading in the School of English Reading Series for 2019 will feature our two resident writers on campus - the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow ( sponsored by the Munster Literature Centre and Cork City Council) Sara Maitland, and our Arts Council/UCC Writer-in-Residence Danny Denton.
The reading takes place on Tuesday, November 26, at the Creative Zone, Boole Library, @6.30pm
Sara Maitland, the fourth Frank O'Connor Fellow to teach at UCC, has been busy all semester with our MA in Creative Writing students and mentoring local writers. She was born in London and attended Oxford University, where she read English. Her first novel Daughter of Jerusalem won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1979. Since then she has written five more novels and several collections of short stories, the most recent in 2013, Mosswitch and Other Stories.
In 2004 she moved to Galloway in Scotland and built herself a house on the moors above Stranraer where she now lives. Since then she has produced an eclectic range of non-fiction including A Book of Silence, (Granta, 2008) part cultural history, part memoir about her own search for silence, Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of our Forests and Fairytales (Granta, 2012), and How to be Alone (Picador, 2014).
Danny Denton is a writer from Passage West, Co. Cork, with a BA in English & Philosophy from UCC, and an MA in Writing from The National University of Ireland, Galway. His first novel, The Earlie King & The Kid In Yellow, was published by Granta Books in 2018, and nominated for ‘Newcomer of the Year’ at the Irish Book Awards. Among other publications, his work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Southword, Granta, Winter Papers, The Dublin Review, Tate Etc, The Guardian, The Irish Times, Architecture Ireland and The Big Issue. Since December 2018, he has been literary editor of The Stinging Fly literary journal.
Montague Poetry Fellow announced
We are delighted to announce that the American poet, Paula Bohince, has been appointed as the 2020 John Montague International Poetry Fellow. Every year the Fellowship allows an international poet to reside in Cork for three months to focus on her / his writing, as well as enjoying and contributing to the literary life of the city.
Paula Bohince is the author of three poetry collections, all from Sarabande: Swallows and Waves (January 2016), The Children (2012), and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (2008). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, POETRY, The TLS, The Irish Times, Australian Book Review, and elsewhere.
She has taught at New York University, the New School, The Poetry School, and elsewhere. She lives in Pennsylvania.
Ms Bohince will be teaching on the MA in Creative Writing from January - April and will also be giving a reading at the University (date to be announced). She will also be taking part in the Cork International Poetry Festival (March 25-28 2020) and will be mentoring two emerging poets over the course of her residency.
The fellowship is an initiative of the Munster Literature Centre and funded by University College Cork. It's named to honour the great Irish poet John Montague who lived in Cork and taught at UCC for many years.
- Find out more about Bohince from her website
- Read her poems in POETRY and Granta
Eibhear Walshe at the Friary
Last Sunday, our Director of Creative Writing, Eibhear Walshe was the guest reader at Fiction at the Friary, run by Madeleine D'Arcy, a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing, and Danielle McLaughlin, who was last year's Arts Council Writer in Residence in the Department of English. Eibhear read from his new novel, The Trumpet Shall Sound.
Next Monday, November 4, will see him reading and discusssing the novel at the Cité Internationale Des Arts, Paris.
John Banville to read with Billy O'Callaghan
Our second event in the Department of English’s Reading Series features UCC’s Visiting Professor of Creative Writing, the internationally renowned Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville. He will be reading with Cork author,Billy O’Callaghan.
The reading takes place on Tuesday, November 5 @ 6.30pm at WW5.
John Banville is the author of over 20 works of fiction, including the 2005 Booker Prize-winning The Sea. He has written travel literature, memoir, adaptations of the German dramatist, Heinrich Von Kleist and numerous screenplays. This will be the first of two public readings he will give as part of his visiting professorship.
Under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, he has published seven crime novels, the first three of which were adapted for a BBC TV series, Quirke, starring Gabriel Byrne. A new novel under the Benjamin Black moniker, The Secret Guests, will be published in January.
Banville has won numerous international awards including the Franz Kafka Prize, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters.
Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of three short story collections: In Exile, In Too Deep and The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind, which won a Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award and was selected as Cork’s One City, One Book for 2017.
His first novel, The Dead House, was an Irish best-seller, and his second novel, My Coney Island Baby, came out earlier this year. A new short story collection, The Boatman, is forthcoming in 2020, the title story of which was a finalist for the 2016 Costa Short Story Award.