In this unique masterclass, award-winning author Lucy Caldwell will talk you through the writing of a story - which participants will be sent to read in advance - from the very first spark to the final edits. Lucy will discuss where ideas come from, how to decide what form a story wants to take, and the specific technical challenges of this story. She will also discuss good editing practice, navigating writer's block, and how to know when your story is finished. There will be plenty of time at the end for your own questions about this story and about writing in general.

Born in Belfast, Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, including These Days, four collections of short stories, most recently Devotions, several stage plays and radio dramas, and is the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories. Her numerous awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the George Devine Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Award (Canada & Europe), a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. In 2021 she won the BBC National Short Story Award with her story “All the People Were Mean and Bad” and in 2022 she was the recipient of the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 the Ulster Tatler chose her as its Woman of the Year.  A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Heaney Centre Fellow, she runs an in-demand masterclass series for the Faber Academy.