The Arts Council has a longstanding partnership with a number of Irish universities offering Writer in Residence/Fellowship positions. These partnerships are designed to:

• enable creative writers to develop their work while in a position of relative financial stability

• provide university students with an opportunity to meet and develop creative reading and writing skills with a practicing writer.

The writer is required to provide a limited number of teaching and office contact hours a week and is granted time and space to concentrate on his or her own writing. The Arts Council contributes €20,000  towards the writer's fee and the university contributes up to €10,000. The university handles all management and administration of the residency programme and the Arts Council plays a role in the selection of the resident writer.

The Arts Council currently supports seven writer residencies, in the following universities: 

The Arts Council is pleased to announce the following Writer-in-Residence/Fellowship appointments for 2024.

Muireann Ní Chíobháin, has been appointed Irish-language Writer-in-Residence at Dublin City University. The Irish-language Writer-in-Residence will be based in Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge on the DCU All Hallows Campus.

Muireann is Cork city native but has deep roots in the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht. Her professional career has primarily been in screenwriting and as an author children’s fiction in both Irish and English.  She has written five Irish-language books for children, which have been published by Futa Fata: Scúnc agus Smúirín, three books in the Eoinín series, and Gealach agus Grian, which was published in November 2023.

Among her other publications in English are GIY’s Know-it ALLmanac (GIY Ireland, 2019) a food education narrative non-fiction title for the whole family, and Murphy’s Law (O’Brien Press) about a very lucky but unlucky dog. She has developed and written many television programmes for young people which can be seen on TG4, RTÉjr, Amazon Prime and Apple TV and was a commissioning editor and executive producer of children’s animation and drama for the launch of Irish language children’s television channel Cúla 4.

Aingeala Flannery  has been appointed Writer in Residence at the School of English at Dublin City University.

Aingeala Flannery is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster. In 2019, her short story Visiting Hours won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize. She is a former Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair winner and has twice been a finalist in the RTÉ Short Story Competition. Her personal essays have been published by IMAGE magazine and by Paper Visual Art (PVA), and broadcast on RTÉ Sunday Miscellany. Aingeala was awarded a Literature Bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland in 2020 and 2021.

Her critically acclaimed debut The Amusements was published by Penguin Sandycove in 2022. It won both the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year at Listowel Writers’ Week 2023 and the John McGahern Prize in association with the University of Liverpool. Aingeala is deputy publisher of The Dublin Review and the producer/presenter of The Dublin Review Podcast. She holds an MA in Journalism from Dublin City University and an MFA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin.

Maynooth University Writer in Residence will be held by Michèle Forbes. Michèle will be situated in the Creative Writing programmes in the English Department at Maynooth University.  

Michèle Forbes is a novelist, short story writer, playwright and actor.  Her first novel Ghost Moth was published internationally to widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, for the First European Novel Award, the Prix Littéraire Francophonie Award, the French Booksellers Novel Discovery Award and the First Book Award at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.  Her second novel Edith & Oliver was selected as a Sunday Times Book of the Year.

Her short stories have received both the Bryan MacMahon and the Michael McLaverty Awards. Postscript, the play she co-wrote with Noelle Brown, was produced at the Abbey Theatre, and she was part of the editorial and research panel on Home: Part One, the national theatre of Ireland's response to the report on Mother and Baby Institutions. She has performed in theatres internationally. Her film work includes Omagh for which she won Best Actress Monte Carlo and was an IFTA nominee. She will be seen in the Sky TV Series Small Town Big Story, autumn 2024, and is currently working on a new novel.

The University of Galway Writer in Residence position will be held by John Patrick McHugh .

John Patrick McHugh is from Galway. His work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Banshee, The Tangerine and Granta and been broadcast on BBC Radio3. He is the fiction editor for Banshee magazine. His debut collection of short stories, Pure Gold, is published by 4th Estate. 

Catherine Prasifka has been appointed as Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

Catherine Prasifka is a novelist from Dublin. Her debut novel, None of This Is Serious (Canongate, 2022), was a national bestseller. It was shortlisted for Newcomer of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards in 2022.

She holds a BA in English Literature from Trinity College Dublin (2018), an MLitt in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow (2019), and an MA in Irish Folklore and Ethnology from University College Dublin (2023). Her second novel This Is How You Remember It will be published in May 2024 by Canongate. 

Ian Maleney  has been appointed as Writer in Residence at University College Cork.

Ian Maleney is a writer, editor, and documentary producer from County Offaly. His first book, a collection of essays entitled Minor Monuments, was published in 2019 by Tramp Press. It was shortlisted for the Michel Deon Prize and the Butler Literary Award.

His writing has been widely published, including in The Guardian, Esquire, and the New Statesman. He was the Temple Bar Gallery & Studios writer-in-residence in 2020, and a recipient of the Arts Council's Next Generation Bursary Award in 2019. He is the founder of Fallow Media, an interdisciplinary online journal of literature and other media, and he has produced numerous successful podcasts, including The Witness: In His Own Words, which won 'Podcast of the Year' at the Irish Podcast Awards and was chosen as one of the top podcasts of 2021 by Apple Podcasts and The Guardian.

University College Dublin Writer in Residence position will be held by  Colin Barrett.  

Colin Barrett is the author of the story collections Young Skins and Homesickness. He is the recipient of the 2014 Guardian First Book Award, the 2014 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize, and the 2014 Rooney Prize and was a 5 under 35 National Book Award Honouree in the United States. From 2018-2020 he was the Rolex Literature Protégé, mentored by Colm Tóibín. His stories have appeared, among other places, in the Stinging Fly Magazine, Granta, Harpers and The New Yorker. His first novel, Wild Houses, is being published in 2024.