Dates: May 18-20, 2026. Time: 10am-4pm

Location: Edda building, Reykjavík, Iceland

Tuition: € 3,000

This course will focus on the structure and differences between the short story, the novella and the novel. Keegan will discuss character, dialogue, point of view, tension, drama, loss, syntax and paragraph structure.

Lectures will run between 10am and 4pm each day, with an hour-long break for lunch.

Anyone with an interest in reading, writing, editing or teaching fiction is most welcome to attend. The texts are yet to be chosen, but the reading list will be forwarded in March/early April. 

Please note the fee covers tuition only. Participants are responsible for organising their own travel and accommodation.

To secure a place, participants complete and sign a booking form and send a €1,000 deposit. No audio or visual recording is permitted.

If you’d like to make a reservation on this course, please email Claire Simpson on clairekeeganfiction@gmail.com

ABOUT CLAIRE KEEGAN

Claire Keegan’s works of fiction are critically acclaimed international bestsellers, translated into 35 languages.

Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields received the Edge Hill Prize. Foster earned the Davy Byrnes Award.

Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, winning the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kerry Prize for Irish Novel of the Year.

So Late in the Day, first published in The New Yorker, was shortlisted for Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.

Keegan was named Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland in 2022 and Author of the Year in Ireland for 2023.

In 2024 she was presented with the Markievicz Award from the Arts Council, and the Siegfried Lenz Award in Hamburg.

This year, Irish Times readers chose Small Things Like These as their Book of the Century, and The Sunday Times critics chose it as Irish Novel of the Century.