How Narrative Works with Carlo Gebler
Info
Date: February 14, 2026
Time: 11am to 4pm
Duration: One Day
Level: Advanced | Intermediate | Beginner |
Cost: €100 (€90 Members)
Location: Online
Course Summary
Carlo Gébler has written a number of novels, most recently The Innocent of Falkland Road and I, Antigone. He has also written short fiction, children’s fiction and works for the theatre. The way that story works is essential to all these different forms. This one day course will run for 4 hours and each hour Carlo Gébler will read aloud a short story (a classic, from the canon) and then explain how, in his opinion, it works. A different aspect of narrative will be explored each hour.
Course Outline
In Hour One, Carlo Gébler will look at the oral (stories told inside a narrative by one character to another); in Hour Two, the first person; in Hour Three, the omniscient narrator; and in Hour Four he will discuss either the use of protocol in narrative (the appropriation of an existing form such as the letter in order to carry a story) or the deployment of white space and omission in narrative in order to make a story work.
Because participants need do nothing but turn up and listen, the titles to be analysed are not listed but the authors can be: Jorge Luis Borges; Varlam Shalamov, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen or Isaac Babel. Participants will not be expected to produce work and Carlo Gébler cannot undertake to look at the participants’ work either.
There will be a one-hour lunchbreak from 1pm to 2pm.
Course Outcomes
The purpose of the class is to enable participants to identify the best narrative strategy for the stories they want to tell.
Carlo Gébler was born in Dublin in 1954 and lives outside Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. He is a writer, novelist and occasional broadcaster, most recently Escape from the Maze, a ten-part series for BBC R4 about the 1983 IRA escape from the Maze Prison, which he wrote and presented. His memoir A Cold Eye: Notes from a Shared Island 1989 – 2024 was published in September 2024. He teaches at the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at Trinity College, Dublin, HMP Hydebank and Loughan House Open Prison. He is a member of Aosdána.
Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.
