Tag Archives: Flash Fiction

NORA & OTHER EVENTS – LATE ’21

Nora Barnacle Museum,
Bowling Green, Galway

I have several events coming up, many around my novel NORA, which was published here in Ireland in April with New Island Books, so I thought I’d do a preview/round-up list:

12th Sep, 9am GMT: SUNDAY MISCELLANY: I’ll be on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday morning with a radio essay about my relationship with my name, Nuala. More here.

17th Sep, 7pm GMT: CULTURE NIGHT: I’m in an artist collective here in Ballinasloe, Group 8, and we’re holding the opening of our annual exhib, UNBOUND, on Culture Night at the Town Hall Theatre in Ballinasloe. My work is a photo book with extracts from an essay I wrote about crying, that featured in Banshee. More here.

18th Sep, 4.30pm GMT: SHORELINES ARTS FEST, PORTUMNA. I’m doing an in-person fiction event with Louise Kennedy in the church. Tickets and more here.

19th Sep, 10am GMT: RETREAT WEST FLASH FESTIVAL. I’m doing an online event – delivering a keynote on writing flash and answering questions too. Tickets and more here.

23rd Sep, 7pm GMT: ULYSSES FOR THE REST OF US. I’m doing an online (and limited-tix in-person) event – chatting with the fab Conner Habib about the Penelope episode of Ulysses (my fave!!). More here.

15th Oct, 11am GMT: CHELTENHAM LITERARY FESTIVAL. I’m doing an in-person event on biofiction with the wondrous Connie Palmen. More here.

22nd Oct, TBC GMT: WESTPORT ARTS FESTIVAL. I’m doing an in-person event on biofiction and women. More to come, keep an eye here.

27th Oct, 8pm GMT: HOPE FOUNDATION BOOK CLUB. I’m doing an online event with NORA. More to come, keep an eye here.

Birdie – Irish Times Review

I’m very pleased with this review of my historical flash fiction chapbook, Birdie, in today’s Irish Times. Thanks to Ruth McKee.

Birdie
By Nuala O’Connor
Arlen House, €10.00 Sat, Dec 5, 2020, 06:00


As you would expect from O’Connor, this collection of flash fiction is a menagerie of exquisite language. The stories transport us to moments in time, and to no-time, as the author paints fragments of history that are palpable with characters who come alive in a brushstroke. Artists and sitters are here as are servants, soldiers, mothers and sisters in stories of losing, longing, and home. Historical fiction can sometimes be clogged with research – not so in these stories which are glances, swift and sensory, with grace-notes of details to let us recognise where we are. Here is the “crookedness of nature,” the lure and lore of home but also the emigrant, the lost lover, the perished child. This collection takes us from the olagón to the “shale-and-ripple of a shell”: a pearl. – Ruth McKee

BIRDIE – where to buy

Signing copies of birdie in Kennys of Galway

I was awarded a COVID-19 Crisis Response Award for Literature, from the Arts Council of Ireland, to write and compile birdie, a collection of 16 historical and out-of-time flash and micro fictions.

You can buy a digital copy of birdie here at Draft2Digital or a kindle edition here. It costs €5.99 / US$5.99 / £4.99.

Arlen House has produced a limited, hard-copy edition of birdie which can be bought from Kennys, Galway (Kennys now has signed copies!); Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop Galway; Hodges Figgis; The Reading Room in Leitrim; Forever Amber in Meath; Waterstones Cork; Dubrays; and O’Mahonys. Your local shop will order.

Reviewers: please contact Alan Hayes at Arlen House.

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More about birdie:

Love is the central force in birdie, a collection of sixteen historical and out-of-time flash fictions that sing with the voices of women loving and losing and learning. The characters here find strength, despite the sorrows of death and deceit: a ghost-child returns to Massachusetts to comfort her grieving mother; the daughter of a Spanish orange tycoon regrets her mother’s terrible choices; an English maid longs for, but can’t be with, her mistress’s son.

Birdie contains O’Connor’s signature ekphrastic work, drawing on artists as diverse as Matisse, da Vinci, and American painter Edwin Romanzo Elmer. The natural world looms large too: sheep and foxes roam these pages, while seawater washes through them.

Described by the Toronto Star as a writer of ‘magical imagination’ and by the Washington Post as ‘soaring’, O’Connor’s collection of historical flash will delight her readers, old and new.