Submissions deadline: April 26th 2020 The 9th annual NEWvember New Plays Festival, Saturday 7th to Sunday 8th November 2020, announces its call for submissions for this year’s festival. NEWvember is a festival of rehearsed readings of new plays that takes place over one weekend at venues across Dublin, produced by the theatre company AboutFACE Ireland. There is no fee for submissions and all plays are read blind of name or gender by our panel. The...

The Romantic Novelists’ Association today announced the winners for the prestigious 2020 Romantic Novel Awards, and author Milly Johnson was presented with an Outstanding Achievement Award. Sadly, Irish shortlisted authors Hazel Gaynor, Jessica Thorne and Lucinda Riley missed out on any of the big prizes. The RNA’s awards are the only national literary prizes that recognise excellence in the genre of romantic fiction. In 2020 they comprise the Goldsboro Books Contemporary Romantic Novel Award, the...

Competition deadline:  31st March 2020 Do you think you’d make a good reviewer? Liberties Press, in conjunction with their author Owen Dwyer, are running a competition for the best review of the first 3 chapters of Owen’s Book Number Games. The competition is FREE to enter and has a first prize of €350. Second prize €100 and third €50. Your review will also be published on the Writers.ie and Liberties website. To enter, simply click...

Boundless and Bare currently have a call out for spoken word artists to join our national spoken word tour this summer. Boundless & Bare is a spoken word agency making steps to raising the profile of spoken word in Ireland through the promotion and representation of artists and events featuring poetry, comedy, storytelling, hip/hop and theatre. The Sunshine Tantrum Tour is a tour that takes place during the month of July for spoken word artists....

Saturday 28th March at 8pm Tullow Church, Brighton Road, Foxrock Krapp’s Last Tape and Samuel Beckett’s Letters are linked together by their strong local connection in a double bill for this year’s Beckett in Foxrock production. In the play (“Beckett’s one-act masterpiece” The Telegraph), Krapp wistfully calls to mind his writing life, his lost loves, his mother and remembers attending church but drifts off to sleep and falls off the pew. The pew that Beckett...

LET’ S SHARE A MILLION STORIES, SAYS WORLD BOOK DAY To kick off the New Year and get ready to celebrate World Book Day 2020 (Thursday 5 March), the charity behind the biggest celebration of books and reading is calling on the nation to get involved in an unprecedented mass super-share – and SHARE A MILLION STORIES. Building on the phenomenal success of the Share a Story campaign, now entering its third year, the super...

Closing date for application: 20th January 2020. The Leuven Centre for Irish Studies (LCIS) offers a grant to four writers per year to be Writer in Residence: two in spring (March-April), two in autumn (October-November). We offer a quiet room in an inspiring city, with ample time and space to get some work done. We also hope that the strong Irish tradition in Leuven will allow for familiarity while in a new city. Our Irish...

The Society of Authors has announced the 2020 shortlists for the Imison Award for the best original script by a new writer, and the Tinniswood Award for the best audio drama script of the year. This year’s shortlistees for the 2020 Imison Award include rapper and beatboxer Testament, South African author Colette Victor and poet and pub singer Vicky Foster. The award is presented annually and honours the best original script broadcast in the UK...

Award-winning screenwriter, Jeb Stuart, is to host a masterclass in writing action movies at the Irish Film Institute. Jeb Stuart is the screenwriter responsible for, amongst others, Die Hard and The Fugitive. Using clips from his blockbusting classics, he will explore the process of mapping twists, creating charismatic characters and crafting memorable lines. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear from a master of his discipline. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear from a...

The Society of Authors has today announced seven shortlists for its annual Translation Prizes. Sharing in a total prize fund worth almost £20,000, the winners will be announced in a ceremony at The British Library Knowledge Centre on Wednesday 12 February 2020. The thirty-five shortlisted works, translated from nine languages, were described by the judges as ‘vivid’, ‘intense’, ‘compelling’, and ‘seeming to accomplish the impossible’. They are stunning translations into English from German, French, Spanish,...