Announcing the Awardees of New Voices: North 2025

We are delighted to announce the five writers selected to participate on New Voices: North 2025: Susanna Galbraith, Josh McCune, John Moriarty, Cameron Tharmaratnam, and Caitlin Young.

The first installment in a new, all-island development series, New Voices: North is a new three-month development programme that will provide five emerging writers living in the North of Ireland with the sustained support of an experienced writer-mentor. The programme will culminate at a showcase, hosted by the Belfast Book Festival, which will take place later this spring.

The three writers selected in the fiction strand are John Moriarty, Cameron Tharmaratnam, and Caitlin Young. They will be mentored by novelist and short story writer Jan Carson.

The two writers selected in the poetry strand are Susanna Galbraith and Josh McCune. They will be mentored by poet Stephen Sexton.

Read more about the awardees and judges below.

New Voices: North 2025 is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Meet the awardees

Susanna Galbraith is from Belfast. Her poems have been published by New England Review, Propel, Poetry Wales, Berlin Lit, Banshee, Cyphers, The Tangerine and others. In 2021 she attended the Stinging Fly Summer School and won the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Competition. In 2023 she was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions and in 2024 for the Seamus Heaney Summer School. She has been the recipient of several Arts Council NI SIAP awards, and her first publications are due out this year. She is also the Project Editor of Abridged, among other things.

Josh McCune is a poet from Belfast, Northern Ireland. After completing a degree in English and Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast, he moved to Edinburgh where he began writing poetry during his masters programme. He has previously been published in Imposter: A Poetry Journal and currently teaches English in a school in Belfast.

John Moriarty is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and drama. He has contributed fiction to The Honest Ulsterman, Profiles, Humour Me and to BBC Radio Ulster’s Storytellers, and non-fiction to The Belfast Review and Slugger O’Toole. He is currently working on a debut collection of stories and essays, themed around encountering the past in the present day, and on his first novel. Originally from Dublin, 2025 will be his sixteenth year living in Belfast. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University. www.johnmoriarty.net ; @SayWhatNowJohn (BSky/IG/Tw).

Cameron Tharmaratnam is a South Asian-Irish actor, writer and filmmaker. He was named as one of The Lyric Theatre Belfast’s New Playwrights for 2022/23 for his play, The Apple Orchard. His debut play, The Worst Person I Know, premiered at The New York Theatre Festival in 2022. As a screenwriter, his short films; French Picnic (2021) and Where You Really From? (2022) have screened across Europe, The US and the UK. His latest film, Irish Son (2025), is showing at festivals this year. He’s currently developing his first novel and writing for film and television.

Caitlin Young is a fiction writer from Dublin now based in Belfast. Her debut novel is currently in development with support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her writing has appeared in publications including The North, The Honest Ulsterman, HOWL, and Abridged. She attended the Stinging Fly Summer School (2024) and was an Irish Writers Centre youth delegate to West Cork Literary Festival (2022). She previously edited Awkward Middle Children: An Anthology of Emerging Writers from Northern Ireland and co-founded The Apiary literary magazine.

Meet the mentors

Jan Carson is a writer based in Belfast. She has published three novels, three short story collections and two micro-fiction collections. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. Jan’s latest novel, The Raptures, was published by Doubleday in early 2022 and was subsequently shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her short story collection Quickly, While They Still Have Horses was published by Doubleday (UK) in April 2024 and Scribner (US) in July 2024. Her writing has been aired on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and RTÉ.

She is the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast 2025 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first stage play, an adaptation of the children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, will be produced by Replay Theatre Company at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast in March 2025. Her next novel, Few and Far Between, is forthcoming in early 2026.

Stephen Sexton is the author of two books of poems: If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin 2019), winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and Cheryl’s Destinies (Penguin, 2021). In 2020, he was awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast.

Each year, the Irish Writers Centre runs up to 20 free and exciting programmes to support writers’ development. Carrying our it’s work on an all-island basis, the Irish Writers Centre offers a range of support schemes, residency opportunities, mentoring, and other development programmes. View more opportunities for writers here.

Join our mailing list to receive weekly updates straight to your inbox. We will keep you informed of what’s on at the Centre, including the current opportunities we have for writers, our events, the latest creative writing courses, resources for writers at all stages, and other news you’ll want to know.