New Voices: North 2025

The Irish Writers Centre is delighted to invite applications for New Voices: North – a new, online development initiative funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

The Irish Writers Centre New Voices initiative is a new pilot series offering ambitious, emerging writers the opportunity to further their burgeoning writing practice via the sustained support of an experienced mentor.

Consisting of two strands – fiction and poetry – the first iteration, New Voices: North, will give five emerging writers living in the North of Ireland the opportunity to develop a new or existing work-in-progress under the guidance of an established writer-mentor.

Following this mentorship, selected writers will participate in a group workshop hosted by their respective mentor, and later will read from their developed works at a showcase hosted by the Belfast Book Festival.

Five writers will be selected for this programme: three in the fiction strand, and two in poetry. The three writers selected to participate in the fiction strand will be mentored by novelist and short-story writer Jan Carson, while the two writers selected to participate in the poetry strand will be mentored by poet Stephen Sexton.

Full details, including how to apply, can be found here.

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 RTE.

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.