2025 Mentorship Bursary Recipients selected

Born in New Jersey and raised in New York, Jayson Carcione now lives in Cork. His short fiction has appeared in The London Magazine, The Forge, Lunate, Époque Press, Fictive Dream, and elsewhere. He was a Best of the Net 2024 finalist and his fiction highly commended in the 2020 Sean O’Faoláin International Short Story Competition. He is currently working on a novel.

Laura Cassidy is a writer from Co. Kildare, living in Cork City. She is a co-founder and contributing editor of Banshee and reviews books for The Irish Examiner. Laura is a recipient of the Cecil Day-Lewis Literary Bursary Award along with several awards from the Arts Council. Her short fiction recently appeared in The Pig’s Back literary journal.

Deirdre Devally’s writes prose, poetry and songs. Her work has been shortlisted in Cúirt New Writing, The Dark Poets Award 111, Fish and more and is published in The Stony Thursday Book; Skylight47, Ragaire, Drawn to The Light Press, Washing Windows V among others. Her work sometimes addresses serious issues, occasionally using dark humour.She has received an Arts Council Agility Award for poetry; an Artist-to-Artist Poetry Mentorship from Glór and a Mentoring Award from Clare Arts Office. A Dubliner living in Clare, she has an MA in Creative Writing from UL and is working on her first novel.    

Mary Walsh Foley is a member of the Write Liners creative writing group in Listowel Library. She credits her mother Sheila and her English teacher in the eighties, Marie Clancy with inspiring her love of writing. Mary’s work has appeared in Abundance Literary Magazine, From the Well Anthology (2024), Confetti, Ariel Chart Literary Journal, LITeZine, Literary Heist and Ireland’s Own.

Margaret O’ Driscoll lives in Cobh where she writes poetry and memoir. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and her debut collection Dancing Around the Handbag, will be launched by Revival Press in early October. In 2021 she was awarded first prize for a memoir piece in Atlantic Currents 11.  

Mich Maroney is a visual artist and writer. Born in Hong Kong of British/Eurasian parents, she spent most of her working life in London and now lives and works in Skibbereen, Ireland. She is the founding editor and designer of a new literature and arts journal, SWERVE, that promotes new and emerging writers and artists, provides writer/artist residencies and the SWERVE Project Space for visual art. She has just finished her first novel for which she was awarded The Book Edit Writers’ Prize in 2022 and an Arts Council Agility Award for Literature. She writes poetry, prose and memoir.

Connor Lynch is an emerging poet based in West Cork. He was inspired to write by Patrick Kavanagh, who is still his favourite poet. His other influences include Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, and Charles Bukowski. Connor writes poems about grief, mental health, society, nature, love & heartbreak, and masculinity. His work has been featured in the Azarão Literary Journal, Fullstop UL and Sunday Mornings at the River. You can follow him on Instagram @connorlynchpoetry.

Ellen O’Connor is from Cork City, where she studies English and History at UCC. Her work has been published both in university journals, and in anthologies such as Poets Meet Painters and The Stony Thursday Book (2024, 2025). She is UCC’s Eoin Murray Memorial scholar for 2025 and hopes to pursue a master’s in creative writing following her undergraduate degree.

Lewis Mc Cahill, based in Co. Clare, is a writer who focuses on short stories that explore the in-between, analysing the familiar themes that connect us all with an abstract approach. He is looking forward to using this mentorship to improve his storytelling and editorial skills as he prepares to publish his first short story collection.

Kevin O’Connell is a twenty-six-year-old writer from Cork. He is a graduate of the Writing and Literature course at Atlantic University Sligo and the Writing MA at the University of Galway. His work has previously been published in the Evening Echo and Sligo Weekender. He currently lives in Mallow.

Michael Dooley’s poems have appeared in Southword, Banshee, the Irish Independent, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and have been broadcast on RTÉ Radio One. His debut collection, In Spring We Turned to Water (Doire Press), was shortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award, and was jointly awarded the Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award. He is a teacher and lives in Co. Limerick.

Lani O’Hanlon is a poet, writer and dance artist. She received the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize in 2025 and the Poetry Ireland/Trocaire Award in 2023. Her poetry collection Landscape of the Body (2024) is published by the Dedalus Press and her writing is featured on RTE Radio’s Sunday Miscellany and in various anthologies and journals including, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, Portland Review, Southword, The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly and Mslexia. Lani was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions in 2021 by poet, Vona Groarke and is the grateful recipient of awards and bursaries from The Arts Council of Ireland. laniohanlon.com