The Stinging Fly Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by writer Mary O’Donoghue to read and discuss Colm O’Shea’s story, ‘Feeling Gravity’s Pull’, originally published as part of the Online Fiction series on The Stinging Fly website in October 2023.

Mary O’Donoghue is the author of The Hour After Happy Hour (Stinging Fly Press, 2023). Her short stories have appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Banshee, The Georgia Review, Subtropics, The Common, and elsewhere. She has published poetry collections with Salmon Poetry and Dedalus Press and translations in dual language volumes from Cló Iar-Chonnacht, Bloodaxe Books, and Yale University Press. Her novel Before the House Burns was published by Lilliput Press in 2010. She is senior fiction editor at the literary magazine AGNI. From County Clare, she lives in Alabama.

Colm O’Shea’s work has appeared in gorse, The Vigilantia Anthology (Chroma Editions), Winter Papers, Sublunary Editions (Firmament), 3AM Magazine, The Tangerine, Fallow Mediaand others. He has also been broadcast on RTÉ radio (Keywords). He was a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair in 2012, and won The Aleph Writing Prize in 2019. His debut work of experimental nonfiction is scheduled to be published by LJMcD Communications in 2024.

Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast’s theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available to subscribers.

⁠Nicole Flattery⁠ is a writer and critic. Her story collection ⁠Show Them A Good Time⁠, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast ⁠can be found here⁠. The podcast’s theme music is ⁠‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan⁠. All of the ⁠Stinging Fly archive⁠ is available to ⁠subscribers.⁠

On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by writer Colin Walsh to read and discuss Clara Kumagai’s story, ‘Real Boys’, originally published in Issue 35, Volume 2: Winter 2016 – Fear & Fantasy.

Colin Walsh‘s first novel, Kala, was published in 2023. A number one international bestseller, Kala won the Irish Book Award for Newcomer of the Year, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the John McGahern Book Prize, and is currently shortlisted for the Nota Bene Prize. Kala was named a book of the year by NPR, the Guardian, Dua Lipa’s Service95 Book Club, GQ Magazine, and The Independent, amongst others. Walsh’s short stories have won several awards, including the Hennessy Literary Award and the RTE Francis MacManus Short Story Prize. His work has been published in The Stinging Fly and broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4. He grew up in Galway and lives in Belgium.

Clara Kumagai is from Canada, Japan and Ireland. Her fiction and non-fiction for children and adults has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Banshee and The Kyoto Journal. Her debut YA novel, Catfish Rolling was nominated for the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Writing, a finalist for the 2023 Great Reads Award and won the 2023 KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year Award.

Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast’s theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available to subscribers.

On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by writer Colin Barrett to read and discuss David McGrath’s short story, ‘The Untameable Donkey’, originally published in our All New Writers issue, Winter 2022/23.

Colin Barrett grew up in County Mayo. His stories have been published in The Stinging Fly, Granta, Harper’s and the New Yorker. His first book, the short story collection Young Skins, won the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second collection, Homesickness, made the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year and was a Book of the Year in Oprah Daily and the Irish Times. His first novel, Wild Houses, will be published in early 2024.

David McGrath is from Baltinglass. His stories at the moment centre around a fictional pub in rural Ireland, of which ‘The Untameable Donkey’ is a part. He has won the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Competition and the Bare Fiction Prize with them, as well as being placed in several other competitions. He has been awarded a residency in Cill Rialaig Arts Centre in November 2023 to finish his novel, The Crack is Barred, which is also set in the world of the pub.

Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, was recently published by Bloomsbury.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast’s theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available to subscribers.

On this month’s episode, publisher and founding editor Declan Meade is joined by poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin who has just been announced as The Stinging Fly’s next poetry editor. Annemarie will take over the role from Cal Doyle in November. Here she talks about her own work as poet and editor, and reads recently published poems by Paula Meehan and Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet and editor from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her publications include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017), Town (The Salvage Press, 2018) and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021). She is a recipient of the Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award and a co-recipient of The Markievicz Award. Her literary fellowships include awards from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany and the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando. Annemarie was a 2022-2023 Decades of Centenaries Poet in Residence at the Donegal County Service Archives and she is an active member of the Writers in Irish Prisons Scheme. Annemarie has edited The Stony Thursday Book No. 18 (Winter 2022) and the current issue of Poetry Ireland Review (140).

Paula Meehan’s poem ‘Natal Horoscope’ is one of four of her poems that were included in our poetry issue, Summer 2022. Paula’s latest collection, The Solace of Artemis, will be published by Dedalus Press in November.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan’s poem ‘The Knee’ was published in our all new writers issue, Winter 2022-23. More of her work has been published by Dedalus Press, UCD Press, Lifeboat Press, Banshee, Poetry Ireland, and others.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose work from our 25-year archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast’s theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available to subscribers.

On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by writer Kevin Power to read and discuss Eimear Ryan’s short story, ‘Body Clock’, originally published in our Winter 2009/10 issue.

Kevin Power is the author of two novels, Bad Day in Blackrock (2008) and White City (2021), as well as a book of criticism, The Written World (2022). He is the winner of the 2009 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Irish Times, and many other places. He teaches in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin.

Eimear Ryan is the author of a novel, Holding Her Breath (2021), and a memoir, The Grass Ceiling (2023). She is a founder of the literary journal Banshee. She lives in Cork.

Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, was recently published by Bloomsbury.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast’s theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available to subscribers.

On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by writer Sophie Mackintosh to read and discuss David Hayden’s short story, ‘Leckerdam of the Golden Hand’, originally published in our Summer 2016 issue.

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of three novels: The Water Cure, Blue Ticket and Cursed Bread. Her debut novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 and won a Betty Trask Award 2019, and Cursed Bread was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023. She has been published in Granta, The White Review and TANK magazine among others, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2023. Sophie’s short story ‘Revivalists’ was published in our Summer 2018 issue.

David Hayden was born in Ireland and lives in England. His writing has appeared in numerous magazines including The Stinging Fly, Granta online, Zoetrope All-Story, The Dublin Review, AGNI, The Georgia Review and A Public Space. His first book of stories, Darker With the Lights On, was published by Transit Books and Carcanet Press.

Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, was recently published by Bloomsbury.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast’s theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available to subscribers.

On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by writer Lucy Caldwell to read and discuss Niamh Prior’s short story, ‘Peter and Jane’.

‘Peter and Jane’ was originally published in July 2021 as part of our online fiction series.

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and in 2019 she was the editor of Being Various – New Irish Short Stories.

Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, was recently published by Bloomsbury.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast’s theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available to subscribers.

On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by writer Darran Anderson to read and discuss Mary O’Donoghue’s short story, ‘During the Russian Blizzard’.

The story first appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of the magazine and was included in Stinging Fly Stories, 2018. It is one of twelve stories included in The Hour After Happy Hour, Mary’s forthcoming short-story collection, which The Stinging Fly Press will publish this summer.

Darran Anderson is an Irish essayist, journalist, and memoirist, and is the author of Imaginary Cities (2015) and Inventory (2020). Over the past decade, he has written on the intersections of culture, politics, urbanism, and technology for a wide variety of publications, including The Atlantic, frieze magazine, The Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement. Shortly after this podcast was recorded, he was one of eight writers worldwide to be awarded Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize.

Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, was recently published by Bloomsbury.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast’s theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available to subscribers.

On this month’s episode of the podcast, host Nicole Flattery is joined by writer and editor Michael Magee to read and discuss Louise Kennedy’s short story, ‘The End of the World is a Cul de Sac’.

The story first appeared in the Summer 2018 issue of the magazine. It went on to become the title story of Louise’s first collection of stories, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Trespasses, Louise’s first novel, was published by Bloomsbury earlier this year and was awarded novel of the year at the An Post Irish Book Awards.

Michael Magee is the fiction editor of The Tangerine and a graduate of the PhD Creative Writing programme at Queen’s University, Belfast. His writing has appeared in Winter Papers, The Lifeboat and in The 32: An Anthology of Working Class Writing. Close to Home, his first novel, will be published by Hamish Hamilton in April 2023.

Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, will be published by Bloomsbury in March 2023.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast’s theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available to subscribers.

On this month’s episode of the podcast, host Nicole Flattery is joined by novelist and critic Rachel Connolly, to read and discuss a short story, ‘Rustlers’, by Michael Magee, which first appeared in the Summer 2017 issue of the magazine.

Michael Magee is the fiction editor of The Tangerine and a graduate of the PhD Creative Writing programme at Queen’s University, Belfast. His writing has appeared in Winter Papers, The Lifeboat and in The 32: An Anthology of Working Class Writing. Close to Home, his first novel, will be published by Hamish Hamilton in April 2023.

Rachel Connolly is a writer from Belfast. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The Guardian, The Baffler, The Financial Times and many other publications. She has also featured as a guest to discuss her work on “This American Life” and several BBC radio programs. Her short story, ‘In The End’ was published in our Summer 2021 issue. Her first novel, Lazy City, will be published by Canongate in 2023.

Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, will be published by Bloomsbury in March 2023.