The Arts Council has a long-standing partnership with a number of Irish universities offering Writer-in-Residence/Fellowship positions to provide university students of Creative Writing MA and MFA programmes with an opportunity to work with and learn from a professional author of distinction, and to enable writers to develop their work while in a position of relative financial stability.

The Arts Council is pleased to announce the following Writer-in-Residence/Fellowship appointments for 2020.

(Photo: Sophie Davidson)

Colette Bryce has been appointed as Writing Fellow at University College Dublin

Colette Bryce is a poet from Derry, with four collections published by Picador and a new collection forthcoming in spring 2020. Her latest book The Whole & Rain-domed Universe (2014) was shortlisted for the Costa, Forward, and Roehampton poetry prizes and winner of a Christopher Ewart-Biggs Award in memory of Seamus Heaney. Selected Poems appeared in 2017 and was the recipient of the Pigott Prize for poetry at Listowel. Colette has long and varied experience of teaching creative writing, at universities including Newcastle, Trinity College Dublin and Villanova PA, and also for mentoring organisations including the Arvon Foundation and The Poetry School. She is an experienced editor, most notably for the journal Poetry London from 2009-13, and will be the incoming editor of Poetry Ireland Review in 2020.

The NUI Galway Writer in Residence position will be held by Arnold Thomas Fanning.

Arnold Thomas Fanning's short stories, articles, and essays have been published in The Dublin Review, Banshee, The Irish Times, Crazyhorse Magazine, Hot Press, The Phoenix Anthology of New Irish Writing, gorse, Correspondences: An Anthology to Call for an End to Direct Provision, Longreads.com, PaperVisualArt.com, The Stinging Fly, and The Lonely Crowd. His work has also been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and RTÉ Radio 1, including for Arena and A Living Word. His most recent play McKenna's Fort won the Oscar Wilde Award for Best New Writing in the 13th International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, and in 2017 he received an Arts Council Bursary in Literature. Mind on Fire: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery, his first book, was published by Penguin Ireland in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Butler Literary Award, The Irish Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, and the Wellcome Book Prize 2019.

www.arnoldthomasfanning.com

Claire Keegan has been appointed as Writing Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

Irish writer Claire Keegan's debut collection of stories, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. The Observer called these stories: 'Among the finest recently written in English'. It was also awarded the William Trevor Prize, judged by William Trevor. In 2007, her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to huge critical acclaim and went on to win The Edge Hill Prize for the strongest collection published in The British Isles. Foster (2010) won The Davy Byrnes Award, then the world's richest prize for a story. It judged by Richard Ford. Keegan's stories are published in English by Faber & Faber, have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, Best American Stories, won numerous awards and are translated into 19 languages. She is internationally renowned as a teacher of creative writing.

'The best stories here are so textured and moving, so universal but utterly distinctive, that it's easy to imagine readers savouring them many years from now and to imagine critics, far in the future, deploying lofty new terms to explain what it is that makes Keegan's fiction work' —The New York Times (Walk the Blue Fields review)

The University of Limerick Creative Writing Fellowship will be held by Gavin McCrea

Gavin McCrea was born in Dublin in 1978 and has since travelled widely, living in Japan, Belgium, Italy and Spain, among other places. He holds a BA and an MA from University College Dublin, and an MA and a PhD from the University of East Anglia. His first novel Mrs Engels, was published in 2015, and was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Walter Scott Prize, the HWA Goldsboro Debut Crown and the Green Carnation Prize, and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, The Sisters Mao, will be published in Spring 2021. During Gavin's residency at the University of Limerick, he will be researching his third novel, Mother Molotov.

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