The Art of the Short Story Fergus Cronin and Thomas Morris in conversation with Mia Gallagher

In Partnership with dlr Libraries

The short story by its nature captures brief but significant moments or events in its characters’ lives, and so continues to captivate readers far and wide. Writer Mia Gallagher talks to two authors about their latest collections. Night Music (Doire Press) by Fergus Cronin is a tense collection of stories, by turns troubling and uplifting, that explore the savagery, the tenderness and the humour that is at the heart of human nature. Open Up (Faber) by Thomas Morris is a collection of five stories brimming with emotional depth, searching for the grace, hope and benevolence in the churning tumult of self-discovery.

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Fergus Cronin is the 2022 Winner of the Maria Edgeworth Prize. Having completed an MPhil in Creative Writing at the Oscar Wilde Centre in TCD in 2014, his stories have been published in The Irish Times, The Manchester Review and The Lonely Crowd, and anthologised in The Old Art of Lying and Surge. In 2017 he was commissioned to write a story for the Bealtaine Festival and in 2019 he was co-editor of Angle, an anthology of writing. For many years he has been very active in both the literary and theatre communities, including producing events at the Galway Arts Festival, the Kilkenny Arts Festival and the Dublin Fringe Festival; serving as a director for Team Theatre Company and Barboró; being a judge for the Irish Times Theatre Awards; and serving as a chairperson for both the Kilkenny Arts Festival and the Lisa Richardson Agency. He divides his time between his native Dublin and North Connemara.

Thomas Morris is from Caerphilly, South Wales. His debut story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing (Faber & Faber) won the Wales Book of the Year, the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. In 2023, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists Open Up, his second book of stories, was published by Faber & Faber this August. He lives in Dublin, where he is Editor at Large at The Stinging Fly.

Photo: Robbie Fry

Mia Gallagher writes novels, short stories and essays. She has also devised and written for theatre. Her books include HellFire (Penguin, 2006) awarded the Irish Tatler Literature Award; Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland (New Island 2016); Shift (New Island, 2018); and the bilingual Dubliners, co-authored with visual artist Mario Sughi (Marinoni Books, Milan, 2022). Recently her essays have appeared in anthologies published by The Stinging Fly and Routledge. She is currently working on a new novel and a short story commission for RTÉ. Mia is a contributing editor with The Stinging Fly and a member of Aosdána.