Mairtín Crawford Award: Preparing Short Stories for Submission - Zoom

Ahead of the Mairtín Crawford Awards Submission window closing on Wednesday 11th March, join 2026 Short Story Judges Lucy Caldwell and Wendy Erskine for a lively conversation about submitting your work to Awards.

Lucy and Wendy will speak about their own experience of Awards – as writers and judges; the specificities of the Mairtín Crawford Award and practical approaches to assembling and presenting work for Submission.

They will be in conversation for about 45 minutes, and then spend 30 minutes responding to your questions.

Traditionally the Award workshops been free. You can absolutely still sign up with no cost attached; but if you’d like to make a contribution to Crescent activity – as sometimes we get asked about - you’d be very welcome to.  

We shall also be running an in-person workshop - places are very limited so we recommend early booking. Click here for more information.

About the judges

Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, most recently These Days, which won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, three short story collections, Multitudes, Intimacies, and the forthcoming Openings (May 2024), and several stage plays and radio dramas. She is also the editor of Being Various, the latest volume in the ongoing Faber series of New Irish Short stories. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2021 she won the prestigious BBC National Short Story Award for her story All the People Were Mean and Bad and in 2022 was awarded the EM Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Wendy Erskine is the author of two short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move. She was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and she received the Butler Literary Award and the Edge Hill Readers' Choice Award. She edited the art anthology, well I just kind of like it. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is a frequent broadcaster and interviewer, and works as a secondary school teacher in Belfast. The Benefactors is her debut novel.