Student Profile A little about our students
“Doing the MA in Writing at NUI Galway was the singular most important decision I’ve made in my writing life. I had made a commitment to writing, and the programme was perfect for me. It balanced writing workshops with building a portfolio of work. In the workshops we read widely and continued to submit new work, giving and receiving feedback in a supportive environment. I concentrated on fiction and non-fiction but some of my classmates also chose poetry and play writing. The programme does more than just develop writing. I felt it developed writers, looking at writing practice and professionalism alongside the creative work. Each week our Writers’ Seminar introduced us to practitioners who shared their work and process, including writers, editors, journalists and publishers. We attended the Cúirt International Literary festival, and I got to see some of my heroes read and talk about their process. I felt we had stepped into the writing world.
The MA was life-changing for me. Toward the end of the first term, my fiction tutor Mike McCormack suggested that I stop submitting short stories and start working on a novel. I did. Faber and Faber will publish the novel in January 2021 and Harper Collins will publish it in the USA. It will also come out in Germany and Italy. Since the MA, I have been invited to contribute to multiple anthologies, give readings, facilitate workshops, curate an author’s series now in its third year and edit a broadsheet of poetry and prose.
The Writing MA in NUI Galway has been transformative. I could not recommend it enough.”
Una Mannion MA (Writing) graduate and author
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