Thursday, 15th October

From the Well Showcase

2.30pm, Cork City Library | Free, unticketed

In its twenty-second year of publication, Cork County Council Library and Arts Service’s annual short story anthology From the Well received its highest number of submissions. Patrick Holloway selected twenty stories, five of which (including the overall winner of the competition 'Bó' by Róisín Ní Chonaill) will be read at this event by the writers.

Ross Browne is a writer from Cork. He writes for the hit BBC show The Young Offenders. His fiction is published in the From The Well anthology. He’s an award winning radio presenter and comedian with a stand up special on Amazon Prime. He writes fiction, poetry, TV and film.
Trish Kearney is a writer living in Cork. Her memoir, Above Water, published by Hachette Books Ireland, reached number three in the Irish bestseller’s chart. Her column, ‘It’s My Life’, featured weekly for two years in The Irish Examiner. She is currently writing her first work of fiction.
Rafael Mendes is a Brazilian-Irish poet whose work has recently featured in Banshee, Wasafiri, and gorse. He was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2023 and the Irish Writers Centre Evolution Programme 2025-2026. His pamphlet, The Migrant Dictionary (Howl New Irish Writing), was a co-winner of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Pamphlet Series 2025.
Originally from Kells, Co. Meath, Lorna Mulvany lives in East Cork with her husband and two children. She is a secondary teacher in CBC, Cork City, and a member of the Midleton Writers Group. Lorna recently published stories in The Four Faced Liar and in the 2026 From The Well anthology.
Róisín Ní Chonaill is a mother of two, living for the past number of years on the islands off West Cork, where tide, weather and the slow turning of seasons find their way into her work. She is currently in her final year of the BA in Visual Art on Sherkin Island. This is her first publication.

Non-Fiction Stories from Southword

4.00pm, Cork City Library | Free, unticketed

In the last ten years, Simon Van Booy, Sandra Beasley, Thomas Lynch, Kim Addonizio & Yoko Tawada have all published creative non-fiction in Southword. Out of this commitment to the form, the Southword Creative Non-Fiction Award was founded to continue publishing compelling writing, as memoir or as innovative essays or as an admixture of both. Three writers whose work was selected from open submission to this award will read their non-fiction stories, which have been published in recent issues of Southword.

Ruby Eastwood is a writer and filmmaker from Barcelona, currently living and working in Dublin. Her essays have appeared in The Irish Times, tolka, the Dublin Review and other publications.
Kieran Hayes’s essay ‘Orphans’ was shortlisted for the 2025 Southword Creative Non-Fiction Award and is published in Southword 50. Another of his essays, ‘King’s Gambit’, was a finalist in this year’s Wild Atlantic Writing Awards. Kieran writes personal essays, narrative prose and autofiction and is interested in contemporary society, mental health, voice and silence, mortality and nature. In 2024 he set up The Yessayists, a peer critique group for writers of creative non-fiction. A graduate of UCC in English Literature and Philosophy, he lives in Galway.
Lucy Holme is a PhD student at University College Cork. Her work has been shortlisted for the Mairtin Crawford Award, The London Magazine Poetry Prize and The Brotherton Award. In 2024 she won the Southword Editor’s Award and the Cúirt Prize for Poetry. Her debut chapbook, Temporary Stasis, (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) was shortlisted for The Patrick Kavanagh Award. A nonfiction collection, Blue Diagonals, was published by Broken Sleep Books in September 2024. Her poetry chapbook Sardines, written with Vasiliki Albedo, was published by Dialect Press in January. She is currently working on her first novel and full poetry collection.

Niamh Mac Cabe & Louise Hegarty

7.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Niamh Mac Cabe is an award-winning author of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, hybrid-prose, and plays. She’s also a visual artist, and a lecturer on the BA in Writing & Literature, BA in Performing Arts, and Masters in Creative Practice at ATU Sligo. Dublin-born, she graduated with a BFA from The Corcoran School of Art, Washington DC. She worked overseas in the Animated Film industry before settling in Leitrim. Her work is published in literary journals and anthologies internationally. Her collection Four Night Seas was published by The Lilliput Press in March 2026.

Buy Four Night Seas and visit the author's website.

“I was hugely impressed by the astounding vision and subtle control in Niamh’s winning story, Four Night Seas. She unpicks the threads of a linear narrative to weave something mercurial and enticing and vast.” — The London Magazine’s Short Story Prize Judges 2023

Louise Hegarty’s stories have appeared in Banshee, The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly and The Dublin Review and have been featured on BBC Radio 4. Her debut novel Fair Play and her short story collection Getting the Electric are published by Picador.

Buy Getting the Electric.

“Melancholy, comic and tender … Hegarty has a gift for constructing uniquely weird worlds with something dark burning at the core.” — Leon Craig

(Moderator) Laura Cassidy is a writer from Co. Kildare, living in Cork city. She is a co-founder and contributing editor of Banshee and reviews books for The Irish Examiner. Laura is the recipient of the 2025 Molly Keane Creative Writing Award along with several awards from the Arts Council.

Eoin McNamee & Uche Okonkwo

9.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Eoin McNamee is the author of eight novels including Resurrection Man, later filmed, and the Blue Trilogy. His work has been nominated for and won many major prizes including the Man Booker Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Kerry Fiction Prize, the Imison Award and the CWA Steel Dagger. His short story collection The Comets is out in October.

Buy The Comets.

“Achingly exquisite prose as concentrated as poetry, as unfailing an ear for the cadences and quirks of Belfast dialogue as Roddy Doyle has for Dublin and a fatalistic sense of suspense.” — Sunday Times

Uche Okonkwo is the author of A Kind of Madness, winner of the 2025 High Plains First Book Award, and a finalist for the 2025 NAACP Image Awards. Her stories have been published in A Public Space, One Story, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Zyzzyva, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, among others. She is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, a Steinbeck Fellowship, and an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. Okonkwo grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College and Conservatory.

Buy A Kind of Madness and visit the author's website.

“Uche Okonkwo’s stories, set in contemporary Nigeria, have a gentle allure, drawing us into the intimate lives of characters and their worlds with elegant, assured prose and a deep understanding of the complex machinations of human manners and sentiment.” — Kwame Dawes

(Moderator) Danny Denton (he/him) is a writer, author of the novels The Earlie King & The Kid In Yellow, All Along The Echo, and Betweenness (publishing April 2027). He was the editor of The Stinging Fly magazine from 2018 to 2022, and remains a contributing editor. In 2025 he was an artist-in-residence at Sounds from a Safe Harbour.

Image credits: Eoin McNamee photographed by James Fraser, Uche Okonkwo photographed by Chris Cox