Nuala Ní Chonchúir's Blog, page 40

PUBLISHING DAY PANEL - IWC - 8th MARCH

The seven writers (incl. me) who are off to Italy in June will take part in a panel, chaired by Anthony Glavin, at the Irish Writers' Centre's Publishing Day this spring.

The Publishing Day at the IWC will also feature the Penguin Ireland Director, a London literay agent, poetry experts and a panel of writers.

Cost: €60/€50 members.

Date: 8th March.

Full details here.

♥ NUDE FOR VALENTINE'S DAY - KINDLE OFFER ♥

To celebrate all the lurve and sensuality that Valentine's Day brings, my short story collection Nude is US$2.51 at Amazon.com or GBP£1.53 at Amazon.co.uk for Kindle, today and for the rest of February.

The blurb on Nude: 'The women and men in Nude play out their desires and frustrations from Dublin to Paris, Delhi to Barcelona, and beyond. In these stories there are mercurial lovers, illicit affairs and mistakes that cannot be undone. And at the centre of it all is the unclothed body: in bedrooms, in art, and in and out of love.'

♥ Happy Valentine's Day! ♥

WRITING MOTHERHOOD

Mary Cassatt drawingKarren Brady once said, ‘I think you'll find I can use my brain and my uterus at the same time.’ On that theme, writer Carolyn Jess-Cooke has started an interesting project about mothers who write called Writing Motherhood. See her Mslexia blog on the subject and join the conversation here.

PAULA CUNNINGHAM REVIEW

Poet Paula CunninghamThe new issue of Burning Bush 2 is a feast of poetry. Poems from Amanda Bell, John W. Sexton and Peadar O'Donoghue, among many more. My review of Belfast-based poet Paula Cunningham's début collection Heimlich's Manoeuvre is there on page 52. Paula was recently placed second in the 2014 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize with a poem entitled ‘The Weather in the Mournes’. She writes droll, magical, moving work.

FLASH MAG OUT NOW

Issue 6.2 of  Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is now available and it has a very swish iridesecent cover. It shines!
Lydia Davis is in it (Lydia Davis - yay!), Ihab Hassan, Ian Seed, and Shellie Zacharia. My story that won the Gladstone's Flash Fiction Award 'Naranjito's Daughter' is in it too. There are reviews of collections by Dan Rhodes, David Gaffney and Peter Cherches. The mag accepts subs all the time. Word count: 360.
For further information and to order a copy, go to: http://www.chester.ac.uk/flash.magazine

NEW REVIEW OF *YOU*

Kim Forrester has reviewed my 2010 novel YOU on her site Reading Matters. And it's a great review, which is lovely :) Read it here.

MSLEXIA SHORT STORY COMP 2014

The Mslexia sixth annual short story competition for women writers is now open for entries.

The first prize is £2,000 and includes two optional extras: a week’s retreat at the home of early women’s writing, Chawton House Library, and a day with a Virago editor. Five other finalists will receive a share of the remaining £1,050 prize pot, and all of the winning stories will be published in the June 2014 issue of Mslexia.

Judge: award-winning novelist, short story author and scriptwriter Jane Rogers (her novel ‘The Testament of Jessie Lamb’, winner of the 2012 Arthur C Clark Award, is published by Sandstone Press). The closing date for the competition is 17 March 2014.

Full details of how to enter can be found at their website: www.mslexia.co.uk/shortstory

FLANNERY'S 'GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE'

Flannery O'Connor - image from mbirdShort Story Ireland invited me to talk about an influential (for me) short story. I chose Flannery O'Connor's 'Good Country People'. Flannery is, like, my cousin or something, after all. Keep it in the family ;)

GLADSTONE'S LIBRARY - PICS & STUFF

View of St Deiniol's church and graveyard from my bedroom windowI'm enjoying my retreat in Wales though I'm not exactly writing. Well, I am am writing but it is all non-fictiony PR stuff for my forthcoming novel: articles about my time in Scotland 22 years ago (the novel was inspired by something that happened to me).
Sophia in the gardenWhen I am not writing, I am reading - then ripping up - my diaries from Scotland (therapeutic!), walking in the pretty village of Hawarden, or eating. The food here at Gladstone's Library is beautiful and abundant.

Entrance to Gladstone's Library Hearth panel: Louisa Yates (library director) Tania Hershman, Adnan Mahmutovic,
Neil Griffiths, Melissa Harrison, Peter FrancisThere was also the small matter of the Hearth Literary Festival here at the weekend, which I went to, so that sucked up some writing time. Very enjoyably. I took my friend Tania Hershman's flash fiction workshop and it was fast-paced and we had to work really hard. Great fun. So I wrote there!
The Glynne Arms, a lovely pub in the village Hawarden village, house Bilingual road sign, HawardenIt's hard to believe I am half-way through my stay already. My room is so warm and comfortable that I am going around in a heat-and-food induced fug most of the time. I need to buck up and write more. Novel no. 4 is calling to me ('Write me! Write me!') and there are exciting developments with novel 3 and my agent, which I can't talk about yet, but which are adding to my distractedness while here. But it's all good :)

Tania and I went to Chester yesterday - a metropolis after Hawarden

SHORT STORY PRIZE 2014

2014 INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY PRIZEFirst Prize: £500 + publication    Second prize: £100Open for entries January 1st – March 31stEntry fee: £10 – submit up to 2 stories and receive a copy of our next issue (worth £10). £5 – submit 1 story. Stories must be no longer than 5,000 words and must be unpublished in print or online. All entries will also be considered for general publication. Stories may be in any theme or genre and you can submit as many times as you like. Online entries only. After making your payment via the Paypal buttons below, please submit your entries to shortfiction2010@googlemail.com with ‘Competition Entry’ in the subject box. The shortlist will be announced in June, the winner and runner-up in July. Please read competition rules here before entering. This year’s judge is prize-winning author Gerard Donovan, whose novels, poems and short stories have received critical acclaim.