Mike Mc Cormack

Mike McCormack lectures in Creative Writing and is the author of four novels - Crowes Requiem (1998), Notes from a Coma (2005), Solar Bones (2016) and This Plague of Souls (2023) and two collections of short stories - Getting It in the Head (1996) and Forensic Songs(2012). He is the Director of the MA (Writing). In 1996 his debut collection Getting it in the Head wasawarded the Rooney Prize for Literature and w as chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In 2006 Notes from a Coma was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award. In 2016 Solar Bones was awarded the Goldsmiths Prize and both the Irish Novel of the Year and Book of the Year Award; it was also long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. In 2018 it was awarded the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2022 a Rough Magic production of Solar Bones played successfully at the Abbey Theatre for ten days. His work has been translated into several languages and in 2019 he was elected to Aosdána.

I am a novelist and short story writer. My work in these forms is broadly realist but also shot through with a streak of strange - surreal, fantastic and conjectural... It takes its cue from the grand experiments of high-modernism - Joyce, Beckett and Flann OBrien -while also acknowledging a debt tothe virtues of genre fiction - crime, western, sci-fi and fantasy genres. The challenge is to draw these disparateelements intocoherent artistic alignment.My work in both the novel and short storyhas been a passionateenquiry into both the telling of stories andthe ways we tell stories - the different structures, idioms and voices we use.From the beginning I have seen fiction as a place of play, conjectureand experiment in which I havetried to expand the received tradition into new narrative forms and thematic considerations.In short, my interest in fiction writing is in exploring andexamining those humantruths and possibilities in waysthat only fiction can do.

My teaching interests lie in encouragingwriters to explore all the possibilities of fiction writing and creative non-fiction with a missionto enable them find their way towards their own voice and their own thematic concerns.As both teacher and writer I am also interested in exploring and developingthe tradition of Irish science fiction.