New Voices: North

Our annual New Voices initiative offers ambitious, emerging writers the opportunity to further their writing practice via the sustained support of an experienced mentor.

Consisting of two strands (fiction and poetry), the first iterations of this series (2025 & 2026), under the banner New Voices: North, have been generously funded by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. The programme has given emerging writers living in the North of Ireland the opportunity to develop their works-in-progress under the guidance of established writer-mentors.

Following these mentorship, selected writers have participated in group workshops hosted by their respective mentors, and later read from their developed works at showcases hosted by the Belfast Book Festival.

Jan Carson, Susannah Dickey, and Stephen Sexton have acted as mentors for New Voices: North mentees.