International Lamplight Fellowship 2025 (Online)

The Irish Writers Centre and Varuna, National Writers’ House are excited to announce a third year of the Lamplight International Fellowship Programme. This online programme is a two-week opportunity for fiction writers to enjoy the combined mentorship and support of both organisations. Find inspiration for writing, benefit from professional development opportunities, and build international connections with other writers to sustain your creative practice.

Please note, this opportunity is exclusively for professional Irish Writers Centre members.

In keeping with goals 1 and 3 of the IWC 2022-2026 strategy this programme will support professional writers to advance their craft and career with confidence and resilience while also cultivating an engaged community of writers and the strategic alliances that support our ambitions.

Programme Outline

This two-week online fellowship runs Monday – Friday, 9-20 June 2025 and includes: 

• Two one-to-one consultations with Conor Kostick and Mary Anne Butler to discuss your current work.
• Q&A session with a multi-award-winning Irish writer Mike McCormack.
• Q&A session with best-selling Australian author, Pip Williams.
• An online industry exchange, with representatives from Irish and Australian industries, including Penguin Random House Australia publisher, Meredith Curnow, and Mags McLoughlin, Teerth Chungh and Damien Donnelly from the Irish Writers Centre team.
• Daily writing opportunities together as a group.
• Group workshops with your peers throughout the week, including the opportunity to share work, talk about the writing process and to receive feedback.

Eight writers will take part in this two-week fellowship programme. Four participants will be based in Ireland (Irish Writers Centre awardees) and four participants will be based in Australia (Varuna awardees). The Irish Writers Centre can only accept applications for Ireland-based writers. Australian-based writers can apply here.

All sessions will take place online: Participants will need a reliable internet connection, and a computer or mobile phone with a camera and microphone.

Time commitment:

Programme dates: Monday – Friday at 9.30am-10.30am Irish Time, 9-20 June 2025

Sessions will take place every morning at 9.30am-10.30am Monday to Friday, for two consecutive weeks.

The two one-to-one consultations will be scheduled in the afternoon within the programme dates.

The full programme schedule will be available to view soon. Please note, participating writers must confirm that they are available for the duration of these dates to attend all morning group sessions.

Who is it for?

This fellowship programme is exclusively for Professional Irish Writers Centre members* who are over the age of 18 and living on the island of Ireland.

*Professional IWC Membership is our initiative to better support and engage with writers who rely on writing as a source of income. There are a variety of eligibility requirements to qualify for professional membership (You do not need a full book published to qualify). Not yet a member? It is quick and easy to sign up for professional membership once you meet the eligibility requirements. Find out more here.

Please note that this fellowship is for fiction writers only (prose, novel, short stories). On this occasion, writers who exclusively practice non-fiction, poetry or plays are not eligible for this programme.

We encourage writers from backgrounds that are typically underrepresented in Irish literature to apply. We particularly invite applications from Minority Ethnic, Black, POC (person of colour), Traveller, Roma, LGBTQ+, disabled and working-class writers.

If you have availed of the Lamplight Fellowship programme in the last three years, in any iteration, you are ineligible.

How to Apply

We ask that all applicants apply via email to projects@irishwriterscentre.ie with ‘International Lamplight Fellowship 2025 application’ as your email subject by Wednesday 2 April 2025.

Confirmation will be sent to you upon receipt of your application. If you do not receive confirmation within two working days, please email projects@irishwriterscentre.ie or call our office at 01 872 1302.

To apply, please send us the following in ONE collated document (PDF or .doc /.docx):

• A cover letter (Max 1 page). Include the following:
  • Details of your writing practice and what you are currently working on
  • Why would you like to do this programme? You may wish to write about how this fellowship will benefit your practice e.g. what will you gain from the one-to-one consultations, peer workshops and Q&A sessions etc
  • What can you provide to the fellowship? The selected writers are expected to be active workshop participants and offer peer support and feedback during the online group sessions.
• Two short writing samples of no more than 1000 words each
• Writer’s CV (max. two A4 pages). Please ensure that your Eircode / postcode, your email and contact number are in your CV. See example for Writer’s CV here.

If you have any questions about the programme please contact us at projects@irishwriterscentre.ie.

Applications that are not collated into one file will be deemed ineligible. 

Due to the volume of applicants we are not able to give individual feedback to applicants, unless they have been interviewed, depending on the scheme. This policy extends across all our calls in the interests of equity and transparency, and because, as a small team, we don’t have the capacity to give individual responses.

Selection Process

Applications will be reviewed by Irish Writers Centre team members and evaluated by an independent selection panel consisting of professional writer(s) for eligibility, expression of intent and the range and quality of writing samples provided.

Testimonials

It was an incredible opportunity to find out about Australian writers and books I had never heard of. It was wonderful to immerse myself in two weeks of workshopping my work-in-progress and receive really kind, respectful but useful feedback on my work. The mentoring I got from Mary-Anne and Conor was hugely significant and beneficial to my writing and contained advice I will return to repeatedly.

June O’Sullivan (Lamplight International Residency Programme 2024 Participant)

The daily workshops were brilliant and propelled me into a rich day of writing. Being in a group of writers at a similar stage meant that we shared issues and challenges, so coming together was a connecting and inspiring experience. One of the best outcomes of the residency was the agreement to meet as a group long-term, which will help sustain a healthy writing life going forward. 

Helen Blackhurst (Lamplight International Residency Programme 2024 Participant)

I thought the whole experience was hugely productive and rewarding. Mary Anne was so helpful, supportive and knowledgeable. Conor’s workshop on the novel was a gem. It was also very reassuring to know that Charlotte despite her huge success struggles with many of the challenges faced by us all.

Séan Mackel (Lamplight International Residency Programme 2024 Participant)

Varuna and the Irish Writers Centre are grateful to the Australia Council for the Arts and the Arts Council of Ireland for their support of this project.

Consulting writers

• Conor Kostick
• Mary Anne Butler
• Mike McCormack
• Pip Williams

Biographies below.

Conor Kostick is a commissioning editor and the author of a number of successful books. In 2009, he was presented with a Special Merit Award by the Reading Association of Ireland; in 2010 he was the Farmleigh Writer-in-Residence. Conor is often asked to judge literary competitions and in 2016 and 2019 was the president of the Irish jury for the EU Prize for Literature. Conor will be teaching this program from his home in Ireland.

Multi-award-winning playwright Mary Anne Butler has spent two decades mastering the art of dialogue. Her plays have won the Victorian Prize for Literature, Victorian Premier’s Award for Drama, Shane and Cathryn Brennan Prize for Playwriting, an AWGIE and two NT Chief Minister’s Book of the Year Awards. Her teaching experience combines a Masters in Arts Education, a Masters in Creative Writing, a Diploma of Acting from VCA and a Dip Ed in English/Drama. She’s currently undertaking a PhD in Literature, writing a novel which investigates how we write hope into the realist fiction of the Anthropocene.

Mike McCormack is the author of four novels – Crowe’s Requiem (1998), Notes from a Coma (2005), Solar Bones (2016)  and This Plague of Souls (2023) and two collections of short stories –  Getting It in the Head (1996) and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996 his debut collection Getting it in the Head was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In 2006 Notes from a Coma was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award. In 2016 Solar Bones was awarded the Goldsmiths Prize and both the Irish Novel of the Year and Book of the Year Award; it was also long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. In 2018 it was awarded the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2022 a Rough Magic production of Solar Bones played successfully at the Abbey Theatre for ten days. His work has been translated into several languages and in 2019 he was elected to Aosdána. He is the Director of the MA (Writing) in the University of Galway.

Pip Williams has spent most of her working life as a social researcher, studying what keeps us well and what helps us thrive, and she is the author of One Italian Summer, a memoir of her family’s travels in search of the good life, which was published by Affirm Press to wide acclaim. Her first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, based on her original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives, was published in 2020 and became an international bestseller. The Bookbinder of Jericho is her second novel.

About Varuna, The National Writers’ House (Australia)

Varuna is the foremost institution for literature development in Australia. The core mission of Varuna is to inspire the creation of Australian writing that enriches and shapes our culture. Through its program of fellowships, writers’ residencies, international residencies and community events, Varuna provides the time and space for writers to develop their craft and professional writing practice. Varuna has also developed an international reach by encouraging an international exchange of writing and ideas, reflected in the strong commitment to our overseas partners, such as Tyrone Guthrie and the Irish Writers Centre.