Free entry: this event is for writers that earn some or all of their income from writing.

Format: panel discussion (45 mins) , followed by a public meeting open to writers in the audience (further 45 mins).

Panelists: Nessa O'Mahony, Siobhán Parkinson, Ian Sansom and Michael West. Chair: Maureen Kennelly (Poetry Ireland)

Details: Words Ireland is hosting a series of nationwide public meetings for professional and practising writers to hear how writers sustain their careers. We want to begin a national debate on the future of literature resourcing and funding in Ireland.

Which opportunities make creative and financial sense? Which types of writing work open doors to further opportunities? Which supports are you lacking and which are a waste of time? We’ll find out from a panel of experienced professional writers from across the genres who will also address issues relating to income, royalties, writers fees, and more.

After the panel discussion, we’ll be giving you – the writers in the audience – the opportunity to have your voices heard. Come prepared with practical improvements and new ideas for the literature sector in an event which will undoubtedly generate lively discussion and debate among the writers, poets, and children’s authors present.

Nessa O’Mahony has published four books of poetry – Bar Talk, appeared (1999), Trapping a Ghost (2005), In Sight of Home (2009) and Her Father’s Daughter, published by Salmon in September 2014. She is a teacher of creative writing with the Open University and am a regular facilitator of creative writing workshops in Ireland and the UK.

Siobhan Parkinson is a writer for both children and adults and a publisher of children’s and YA books through Little Island Press, and is a former co-editor of Bookbird and editor of Inis. She was made Ireland’s first Laureate na nÓg in 2010, and has worked as writer-in-residence and short-term Writers-in-Schools residencies across Ireland.

Ian Sansom from Essex, England, is the author of the Mobile Library Mystery Series. As of 2016, he has written three books in a series that will comprise a projected forty-four novels. He is a frequent contributor to, and critic for, The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He was a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and has taught at Brunel University and Queen’s University, Belfast. He is a former Director of the Warwick Writing Programme at the University of Warwick and is Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre.

Michael West is an award-winning playwright and translator whose original scripts have been staged in the Abby Theatre and further afield. A noted adaptor of literary work, West has collaborated in Corn Exchange productions of Joyce’s Dubliners, Nabokov’s Lolita and most recently, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, by Eimear McBride. He was 2015/2016 Writer-in-Residence for UCC. He is West is a co-founder with Annie Ryan, of the Corn Exchange Theatre Co.