FICTION WORKSHOP WITH CLAIRE KEEGAN June 8 & 9 Belfast.

FICTION WORKSHOP WITH CLAIRE KEEGAN 10am- 5:30pm on June 8 & 9, 2015 Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast

 

Claire Keegan, internationally acclaimed author and teacher of creative writing will be running a fiction workshop to conincide with the Belfast Book Festival.  The two days will concentrate on works-in-progress submitted by participants. Manuscripts (novel excerpt or short story of up to 3,000 words) are due on or before May 29, distributed to and read in advance by all participants.

Keegan will spend between 3-5 hours on each text and then examine and discuss the manuscripts with the group. Discussion will include the structure of a narrative, paragraph structure, time, tension, drama, melodrama, statement, description, suggestion, conflict, character, humour, point of view, place, time and setting. The aim, always, is to help each author with the next draft. The weekend will be of particular interest to those who write, teach, read or edit fiction -- but anyone with an interest in how fiction works and helping others to do so, is welcome to attend. While most participants like to submit a manuscript, this is not a requirement. Tuition is £325.

To book your place, please contact: ckworkshops@yahoo.co.uk

Claire Keegan has written Antarctica, Walk the Blue Fields and Foster (Faber & Faber). These stories, now translated into 14 languages, have won numerous awards. Walk the Blue Fields was Richard Ford’s Book of the Year in The Guardian, 2010. Foster won the Davy Byrne’s Award, then the world’s richest prize for a single story. Of Antarctica, The Observer said, “these stories are among the finest stories recently written in English.” Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize, awarded to the strongest collection published in the British Isles. Foster was elected by readers as the best story published that year in TheNew Yorker. She also has earned an international reputation as a teacher of fiction, having taught workshops on four continents. She holds an MA and an M.Phil in Creative Writing and has taught creative writing on four continents.

“Every line seems to be a lesson in the perfect deployment of both style and emotion.” Hilary Mantel

“The best stories are so textured and so moving, so universal but utterly distinctive, that it’s easy to imagine readers savouring them many years from now and to imagine critics, far in the future, deploying new lofty terms to explain what it is that makes Keegan’s fiction work.”-The New York Times

“Every  single word in the right place and pregnant with double meaning.” - Jeffrey Eugenides, The New York Times

Keegan is a rarity, someone I will always want to read.” – Richard Ford