IWC’s first Roaming Writer-in-Residence is announced

Congratulations to Jan Carson who has been selected as our first ever Roaming Writer-in-Residence! Jan will travel by train to various universities throughout Ireland, where she will facilitate workshop with Creative Writing students. She will be working with the students to create and send “Postcard Stories”; pieces of micro-fiction written on postcards. 

Jan is a Belfast-based writer and currently has published one novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears (Liberties Press, 2014), a short story collection, Children’s Children (Liberties Press, 2016) and a microfiction collection, Postcard Stories (Emma Press, 2017). Her next novel will be published in spring 2019.

What is the Roaming Writer-in-Residence?

Funded by ACNI and in partnership with Irish Rail and Translink, this is the Irish Writers Centre’s first ever mobile all-island residency working with a Roaming Writer-in-Residence (WIR).

Travelling from north to south on our railway lines, the Roaming WIR will listen to voices and conversations of people on the trains, accumulating stories and building a treasure chest of potential workshops or essay ideas. The writer will connect and work with student writers all over Ireland. We will be working with two prestigious universities in Northern Ireland and two in the South, working directly with their post-graduate students in Creative Writing.  

Using their own travel, and in particular train travel experiences to develop the residency, the Roaming WIR will aim to inspire student writers to explore different ways to use overheard conversations, or events witnessed on trains in various different literary contexts.  The writer will also encourage students to connect with the journey of his or her own work through various online platforms.