Join writer and facilitator Órfhlaith Foyle for a two-hour masterclass at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast!

Join acclaimed writer and facilitator Órfhlaith Foyle for a two-hour masterclass on the writing life! This is the second event in our jam-packed day in Belfast!

Hilary Mantel: You have to trust you don’t understand, and you have to do that whilst walking in the dark.

A talk on what it takes to be a writer. The bargains you have to make with yourself and society. The realities of writing and living with the knowledge it is a solitary life lived alongside relationships/marriage and another job. You are communing with your own psyche, creating fiction from your imagination and experience of the world.

A two hour Masterclass given by Órfhlaith Foyle on living a writer’s life, the writing process, a writer’s voice and style, how to write and the economic realities of writing, teaching creative writing and the Basic Artist’s Income. Órfhlaith will also refer to the experience of writers past and present. There will be time for questions and discussion towards the end of the masterclass.

Órfhlaith Foyle is a short story writer, poet, dramatist and creative writing teacher and she lives in Galway. Doire Press published her third collection of short stories Three Houses in Rome September 2023. She wrote and directed the radio dramas May’s End and How I Murdered Lucrezia, premiered on Newstalk Radio in October 2021 and 2023 respectively. Órfhlaith Foyle received an Arts Council of Ireland Literary Bursary October 2025 to assist her in writing her fourth short story collection The Other Poet Drives a Black Mercedes, published by Doire Press Autumn 2026.

Description supplied by the event organiser.