Take a workshop write here in West Cork

Fancy putting pen to paper and taking part in a writing workshop in West Cork this summer?

Details were this week revealed about six three-day workshops which are due to take place as part of the West Cork Literary Festival.

The workshops are on sale now and each workshop will have a maximum of 15 participants. These include Nature Writing for Times Like These with Polly Atkin, Short Story with Ross Raisin, Writing Places with Sarah Moss, Novel Writing with Paul McVeigh, Travel Writing: The Sea with Helen Scales and Poetry with Ruth Padel. Five of the workshops take place in Bantry and participants for Helen Scale’s workshop will be boarding the ferry to Whiddy Island each morning.

Polly Atkin’s Nature Writing for Times Like These will draw on contemporary nature writing from around the world to think through different approaches to bringing the natural world into our writing in effective and meaningful ways. This workshop is open to writers at any stage of their practice. Polly’s non-fiction has been longlisted for the Barbellion Prize, dedicated to the furtherance of ill and disabled voices in writing, and the Wainwright Prize for nature writing. Her work on nature and disability is included in various anthologies, including ‘Moving Mountains’.

Short Story with Ross Raisin will provide a relaxed, creative environment for a close examination of the short story form. Whether you are starting out or already working on a collection, you will be encouraged to focus on different aspects of the form, producing new writing as well as developing an expertise in re-writing. You will leave with new work, a new range of skills and confidence to continue writing. Ross has worked for the Guardian Masterclass programme, teaching a long-running 6-week fiction course; he teaches at the University of Leeds; for the education charity, First Story, and also works as a writing mentor to emerging writers. He is a previous winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award and won the 2024 BBC National Short Story Award.

Writing Places with Sarah Moss is founded in serious play and in playful presence. Participants will be attending to places and the beings in them, thinking about words for things, time and place as well as experimenting, trying ideas, making and un-making, seeing what happens. Sarah has written several novels including The Sunday Times top ten bestseller ‘Summerwater’ and ‘Ghost Wall’, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, and two works of memoir, ‘Names for the Sea’, an account of her year living in Iceland, and ‘My Good Bright Wolf’. She moved to Dublin in 2020 to join the UCD Creative Writing department.

Novel Writing with Paul McVeigh will explore the elements needed to write a novel that hooks a reader; looking at how to create characters that capture us, the use of dialogue, how to master emotion on the page, the importance of plotting and how to make your setting more than a passive backdrop to your story. His debut novel, ‘The Good Son’, won The Polari First Novel Prize and The McCrea Literary Award, and was shortlisted for many others. Paul has judged many literature prizes including the Royal Society of Literature’s VS Pritchard Award, the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year for the second time this year.

Immersed in the seascape of Whiddy Island, join marine biologist and bestselling author Dr Helen Scales to explore Travel Writing, with a focus on nature and place in coasts and seas. Beginners are welcome. Helen writes for National Geographic Magazine and the Guardian, teaches at Cambridge University and is a storytelling ambassador for the Save Our Seas Foundation. Her latest book ‘What the Wild Sea Can Be’ has been longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction and the Women's Prize for non-fiction.

Poetry with Ruth Padel is as opportunity to read poems together as well as writing them so if you haven’t written poems before, no problem! Ruth’s hope is you might finish these three days with three poems roughed out, and at least one in a near-finished state. Ruth is an award-winning poet. She has won the UK National Poetry Competition and published twelve acclaimed poetry collections. She is also a novelist and the writer of 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, on reading contemporary poetry. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London.

For more information or to book a spot, visit westcorkmusic.ie/LFWorkshops or call the festival office on 027-52788. The full West Cork Literary Festival line-up will be announced on 3 April.