Notre Dame Kylemore offers two Instructor-Led Writing Programs each year: one in Winter and one in Spring. These programs are designed for writers seriously engaged in a work of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry.
Upcoming Sessions
Winter 2025 Session with Instructor Mike McCormack
- Dates: November 30 – December 5, 2025
- Applications Open: Now
- Applications Close: November 10, 2025
- Price: €1500/$1650
- Winter 2025 Schedule
Spring 2026 Session with Instructor Dionne Irving Bremyer
- Dates: April 12 – 17, 2026
- Applications Open: December 1, 2025
- Applications Close: February 12, 2026
- Price: €1500/$1650
How to Apply
In order to be considered for this residency, please submit a work in progress. It must not have been previously published, and it must relate specifically to the work you plan on doing while in residency with us. Please submit according to your form:
- For prose: up to 1,000 words of a work in progress for which the application is being made. It should be in 12-point font and double spaced.
- For poetry: ten pages of poetry, single spaced, with no more than one poem per page.
Applications will be read by a panel and accepted on a rolling basis.
Apply for our Winter 2025 and/or Spring 2026 Sessions
Residents will:
- Connect with fellow writers
- Attend talks and workshops led by a distinguished writer-in-residence
- Have dedicated, uninterrupted time to write
Program Includes:
- Introduction session
- 2-3 talks by the writer-in-residence, a professional writer who will be with the group for the duration of the residence
- Room and board: Private en-suite bedroom and nutritious & filling meals prepared by our in-house chef
- Access to the Kylemore Abbey grounds & museum
About the Writers in Residence
Winter Session
Mike McCormack’s first collection of short stories Getting It In The Head was published by Jonathan Cape in 1996. The book won the Rooney Prize and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
This was followed in 1998 by his first novel Crowe’s Requiem.
In 2005 Notes from a Coma was published and was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award. In 2010, The Irish Times described it as "the greatest Irish novel of the decade just ended".
A second collection of short stories Forensic Songs was published by Lilliput in 2012.
Solar Bones was published by Tramp Press in 2016 to widespread critical acclaim. The single novel-length sentence story which takes place on All Souls’ Day in Louisburgh, Co Mayo went on to the win the coveted the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize in November of that year and in December won The Eason Book Club Novel of the Year at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards. It was also an Irish Times Book Club Choice and was Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and for the European Literature Prize 2018. In June 2018 the book went on to win the prestigious €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award, the world's most lucrative literary prize for a single novel published in English.
The book has also been translated into over ten languages while UK rights have been sold to Canongate and the US rights to Soho Press.
In 2023 Canongate, in tandem with Tramp Press, snapped up Mike’s new novel. Part roman noir, part metaphysical thriller, This Plague of Souls was published in October to rave reviews.
Mike has also written the screenplay for The Terms, based on his short story, which was adapted into an award-winning short film directed by Johnny O'Reilly.
He was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in 2007 and has been the recipient of several Arts Council Bursaries. In May 2018 he was elected as a member of Aosdána, the Irish association of artists.
Mike lives in Galway with his wife Maeve and young son.
Spring Session
Dionne Irving Bremyer is originally from Toronto, Ontario. Irving Bremyer writes fiction and nonfiction that investigates and questions personal, cultural, and national hybridity emergent in a postcolonial world. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. Two essays, “Treading Water” and “Do You Like to Hurt,” were notable essays in Best American Essays 2017 and 2019.
She is the author of the novel Quint (7.13 Books) is a fictional retelling of the true story of the Dionne Quintuplets. Her short story collection The Islands (Catapult Books) follows the lives of Jamaican women—immigrants or the descendants of immigrants—who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism. Her edited collection Breastfeeding and Culture: Discourses and Representations (Demeter Press)include essays that deal with the varied and complicated ways in which cultural attitudes about mothering and female sexuality inform the way people understand, embrace, reject, and talk about breastfeeding.
Irving Bremyer has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and awarded two Tennessee Williams scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a scholarship and residency from the Voices of Our Nation Writers Conference. She was also among five writers on the short list for the prestigious 2023 Giller Prize.