Announcing the Annaghmakerrig Residencies Awardees 2025

We are excited to announce that Emily Cooper, Emer Lyons, Rosa Mäkelä, Afric McGlinchey and Nuala O’Connor are the awardees of the 2025 Irish Writers Centre Annaghmakerrig Residencies.

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Created in partnership with the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, these residencies will provide the awardees each with a one-week stay at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (County Monaghan) in order to develop their writing practice. Read more about the awardees below.

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Emily Cooper

 

Emily Cooper is a poet, writer and editor based in Donegal. She has published two books of poetry: Glass with Makina Books in 2021 and The Conversation, a collaborative collection with Jo Burns, published by Doire Press in 2024. Her poetry and prose has been published in The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Banshee, London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review and elsewhere and she is an editor for The Pig’s Back literary journal.

 

 

Rosa Mäkelä

 

Rosa Mäkelä is a writer from County Galway. Her stories have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Pig’s back, Banshee and Channel.

 

Emer Lyons

 

Emer Lyons is a writer, performer and researcher from West Cork living in Galway. She has a PhD in lesbian poetry from the University of Otago. In 2025, her show PART(S)(W)HOLE was part of the Scene + Heard festival in Dublin, she was the Áras Éanna Artist in Residence on Inisheer and the recipient of a Creative Practitioner Bursary both in association with the Galway City Council. She is one of four poets in the anthology Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2025) edited by Leeanne Quinn. In 2024, she was a Play it Forward Fellow with Skein Press under the mentorship of Pascal O’Loughlin.

 

Afric McGlinchey

 

Afric McGlinchey is a multi-award-winning poet and author of Tied to the Wind (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), a prose-poetry childhood memoir, for which she received an Arts Council Literature Bursary. It has been translated into Macedonian and excerpts broadcast on RTE. Her previous two poetry collections were translated into Italian. An editor and workshop facilitator, Afric is also a mentor on the Munster Literature Centre and Poetry Ireland Mentorship panels. Her new collection, À la belle étoile (Salmon Poetry, 2025), received an Agility Award and Forward Prize nomination. She is currently completing a second auto-fictional memoir.

 

 

Nuala O’Connor

 

Nuala O’Connor lives in Co. Galway. Her writing been widely published, and won many literary awards. Her sixth novel Seaborne, about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, was nominated for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards. She won Irish Short Story of the Year at the 2022 Irish Book Awards. Her fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, was published by Arlen House in 2025. www.nualaoconnor.com

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About the Tyrone Guthrie Centre

The Tyrone Guthrie Centre is a cross-border organisation that offers time away, space to work, and opportunities for collaboration and networking for artists that facilitates the development of their practice across all art forms.

Annaghmakerrig House is situated in the quiet countryside of County Monaghan, and together with our self-catering cottages, our studios and performance spaces, as well as our lake and our forests, gardens, and fields, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre is a place where creativity flourishes amid the many pressures and distractions of contemporary life. Providing a quiet environment that esteems, supports, and develops our artists is what we do, but we aim to do it more holistically by creating audiences for our artists where appropriate, and by creating partnerships with organisations such as The Irish Writers Centre for the benefit of artists from all communities on the island of Ireland.