Short Fiction: Maggie Armstrong & Thomas Morris

Join us for a conversation on short fiction! Maggie Armstrong’s new collection Old Romantics (Tramp Press, 2024) offers alternative romances told from a netherworld of love and disenchantment, following the interior biography of a Dublin woman, from early adulthood into the trials of young family life. 

Thomas Morris’ most recent collection Open Up (Faber & Faber 2023) presents tender and innovative stories of connection and disconnection as characters seek grace, hope and benevolence in the churning tumult of self-discovery. 

Hosted by Bernie McGill. 

Maggie Armstrong’s work has been published in the Dublin Review, Stinging Fly, Banshee and elsewhere. She has worked as a critic and reporter for various newspapers. In 2023 her story Dinner and a Show was long-listed for an Irish Book Award. She grew up in Dublin, where she still lives. Old Romantics is her first book. 

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, Thomas was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists and published his second book of stories, Open Up. He lives in Dublin, where he was formerly editor of The Stinging Fly.

Bernie McGill is the 2023 winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her collection This Train is For (No Alibis Press). She is the author of two novels: The Watch House (nominated for the Ireland European Union Prize for Literature in 2019) and The Butterfly Cabinet (named by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes as his novel of the year in 2012). Her first collection of stories, Sleepwalkers, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize in 2014 and she is a former winner of the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Award in the US. Her work has appeared in anthologies The Black Dreams, Her Other Language, Belfast Stories, The Long Gaze Back, The Glass Shore and Female Lines, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. Bernie works as a Mentor for the Irish Writers’ Centre and is the current Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow in the School of Computer Science at Queen’s University, Belfast.