Beginners' Creative Writing with John Maher

Saturday 26th & Sunday 27th May: 10.30am-4.30pm
€150 / €135 (members)

Storytelling is a natural human need both to explain and to entertain; storywriting is an extension of this creative impulse. This creative writing class will look at the short story and the novel formats, in particular.

Over the course of two days, examples of writing will be analysed and participants will produce their own work. All are welcome: those who have already embarked on a writing project, those who have published and those who simply want to 'give it a go' and who haven't written anything so far.

By the end of the course, participants will be encouraged to have at least one short story of their own completed. Areas such as character building, tone and tension will be looked at. In the case of those who are interested in the longer form of the novel, it is expected that a rough outline of the novel with a couple of chapters will have been completed

John Maher was born in Dublin in 1954. He is winner of the Francis McManus Short Story Award (R.T.E) and the P.J. O'Connor Radio Play Award (R.T.E). His novel, The Luck Penny (2007), won the Arts Council of Ireland's largest literary award, the Lar Cassidy Award. He has been awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary in Literature (2009) to work on his next novel. He has taken up residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the McDowell Colony, New Hampshire. His stories have been broadcast on R.T.E. and B.B.C.

His study, Slouching Towards Jerusalem: Reactive Nationalism in the Irish, Israeli and Palestinian Novels, was  published in November 2011. He is currently Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Mediterranean Studies, at King’s College, London. He has three children, and lives in Rathdowney, Co. Laois.

www.johnpatrickmaher.com

Members of the Centre can avail of a discounted rate by calling 01-8721302

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