We often boast here about student success in the literary world but some of our students also go on to further educational opportunities, building on their experience on the MA in Creative Writing at UCC.

Poet Alyssandra Tobin, on our current MA programme, will shortly be winging her way to New York where she’s won a place on the prestigious MFA programme at NYU, which is rated among the top ten graduate programmes in the US. Faculty includes Anne Carson,  Joyce Carol Oates, Yusef Komunyakaa, Deborah Landau and Sharon Olds, so Alyssandra will be in very good company.

Fiction writer Mark Kelleher graduated last year and has been awarded a full four-year PhD scholarship at Dublin City University.  Mark will be conducting research on the post-modern novels of David Markson, Thomas Bernhard, Dennis Cooper and Tom McCarthy.  

Congratulations to both of them.   

Meanwhile, three of our current students performed at UCC ‘s Creative Writing Showcase at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry last week, which is fast becoming an annual event at the festival. Introduced by the course director, Dr Eibhear Walshe, fiction writer Eileen O’Donoghue and poets Paul Asta and Una Ni Cheallaigh read from works in progress.

And finally, their classmate Jacqui Corcoran has been developing a sideline career in sports journalism since winding up her MA course work.  In the past month, her features on cliff diving, female teenage drop-out rates in sport, and a Waterford football club with a disabilities programme have appeared in the Irish Examiner.