Your Fiction and Poetry: Practice, courage, and the implementation of your ideas with Mary O'Donnell

This workshop welcomes the glorious diversity of everyone who wants to write, try to write, or simply think about writing. It aims to provide tools that will equip you to lay out your own thoughts and ideas, to develop them (i.e. redraft them), and refine them. 

Gather to share a creative space away from the push and pull of ordinary living, and to find the adventure in words and feelings.

The morning session will be for short fiction and the afternoon for poetry. You will look at samples of published stories and poetry and discuss how these work (or not), as well as techniques, style and tone. Some ideas that arise may overlap in both sessions—questions to do with the redrafting of work, identifying your own needs as a writer and what you wish to convey.

If wished, participants may bring two pages only of a work of fiction in progress, or one poem only.

Mary O'Donnell has been publishing novels, short stories and poetry since 1990 and her work is regarded as key in expanding the horizons of Ireland's traditionally male-dominated literary world. The Light Makers, Mary's debut best-selling novel, received the Sunday Tribune's Best New Irish Novel 1992 Award and her other published novels include The Elysium Testament and Where They Lie. Her most recent and highly praised collection of short stories, Walking Ghosts was published in 2025. Her poetry has been translated into Hungarian, Spanish and Portuguese In 2023 she received an An Post Irish Book Award for her political poem Vectors in Kabul. Mary has taught Creative Writing at the universities of Galway, Maynooth, University College Dublin and University College Cork, as well as for the University of São Paulo. 

After booking your workshop, we will email you a confirmation of your place.

Venue Accessibilty information here

Cancellation/Refund Policy

If you cancel your place on a workshop three weeks or more before the start date, you will be offered a refund, less the booking fee.

If you cancel with less than three weeks before the start of a workshop, you will not be entitled to a refund, though a refund may be offered depending on the circumstances.

Workshops require a minimum number of participants to run.