Storycraft: with Brian Leyden

This workshop is for anyone interested in reading and writing and progressing their own personal writing goals. For those who wish to learn how fiction works and the ways in which creative nonfiction borrows the techniques of fiction writing. Short examples of the participants own work will be considered alongside the work of well know writers for what can be learned about story craft and structure, pace, voice, character, dialogue, the importance of time and dramatic development. Places are limited and Brian Leyden’s workshops have earned a reputation for filling up quickly so early booking is recommended.

BRIAN LEYDEN is a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, memoirist, performer, radio contributor, and literary editor and publisher with Lepus Print. His work includes the novels Death and Plenty and Summer of ’63, and the short story collections Departures and Sweet Old World: New and Selected Stories. The Irish Examiner said his most recent novel, Love These Days, “grabs the reader’s attention from the very first page and holds it to the end….”

His bestselling memoir The Home Place continues to attract new readers, and his personal essays have been published in Winter Papers 2 & 8, Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy, and The Landscape’s Fierce Embrace: the poetry of Francis Harvey.

His one act play Remember Me premiered at the Hawk’s Well in May 2023. He delivered an abecedary as a commissioned response to the major exhibition in the Model Arts Centre on the Sligo landscape tradition from Jack B. Yeats to present day artists in the ‘Sligo Wave’. In June this year he presented ‘Going North’ at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University Belfast at their special commemorative event North at 50. Writer Bernard MacLaverty has described his work as ‘Life remembered with precision and love’.