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A Writing Retreat in Ireland: Choosing Your 2027 Dublin Workshop
by Byron Turner
23 hours ago
A writing retreat in Ireland asks a specific question of you before you ever board the plane: what do you want your writing to do that it cannot do at your desk at home? For the May 2027 Dublin workshop, your answer shapes everything, down to which of three cohorts you apply to. WritingWorkshops.com returns to Dublin from May 2 to 7, 2027, for a working week built around rigorous feedback, private one-on-one conferences with your instructor, and a city that has produced more essential literature per square mile than almost anywhere on earth. What follows is a guide to telling whether the program fits the work you are doing right now, and to choosing your place in it.
What Makes Dublin Worth a Week of Your Writing Life?
Dublin is a UNESCO City of Literature, and the shorthand for why is that four writers who lived and worked here won the Nobel Prize: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, and Heaney. That is the plaque-on-the-wall version. The more useful version, for a writer deciding where to spend a hard-won week, is that Dublin makes the writing life feel ordinary. Joyce mapped Ulysses onto real streets you can still walk. Beckett pared language down until silence did the work of speech. Anne Enright won the Booker for The Gathering without raising her voice above a murmur. Claire Keegan built Small Things Like These out of what she refused to explain, a whole moral world compressed into a hundred pages. Sally Rooney turned unpunctuated dialogue into a signature. These are not tourist facts. They are craft lessons, available on foot.
The Irish sentence carries an inheritance from spoken storytelling, which is part of why so much Irish prose reads aloud so well. Spend a few days where that tradition is in the water and your own ear starts to sharpen. Our workshop headquarters sits at the Iveagh Garden Hotel, steps from Grafton Street and St. Stephen's Green, so the Museum of Literature Ireland, Trinity College, and the doorways Joyce wrote through are all within a short walk. Dublin is one of several destination retreats we run each year, and it remains one of the most requested for a reason writers understand the moment they arrive.
Which Dublin Workshop Is Right for You in 2027?
Here is where the decision gets concrete. For 2027, Dublin offers two formats, and the right one depends on where your pages are.
The first is The Workshops, with Thao Thai leading fiction and Chloé Cooper Jones leading nonfiction. In this format, every writer arrives with two completed pieces, each up to 5,000 words. The first is workshopped live by your cohort of ten writers at most, gathered around one table, giving your pages the kind of sustained attention they rarely get anywhere else. The second is reserved for a private one-on-one conference with your instructor, a meeting that past participants often call the most valuable hour of the week. This format is for writers who arrive with finished drafts and want rigorous, direct feedback from every seat at the table.
The second format is new for Dublin 2027: the Fiction Master Class and Generative Seminar with Marie-Helene Bertino. You still submit one completed piece of up to 5,000 words, and Bertino discusses it with you privately. But the class sessions are given over to something different. Instead of workshopping submissions, you spend that time on craft lectures and generative writing, making new work in the room. This format suits writers who want to break open a stalled project, generate fresh material, or restart a practice that has gone quiet. Fiction applicants choose between Thao Thai's workshop and Bertino's master class, or mark that either would work. Nonfiction writers work with Cooper Jones.
See all three 2027 cohorts, the full schedule, and everything included in tuition on the program page.
Explore Writing Workshops Dublin 2027Who Will Be Reading Your Pages in Dublin?
A retreat is only as good as the writers reading your work, and the 2027 faculty is the reason to take this one seriously.
Marie-Helene Bertino is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction and the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale. Her most recent novel, Beautyland, won the American Book Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and landed on year-end best lists at the New York Times and Time. She has won two O. Henry Prizes and a Pushcart, and she once held the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, so she comes to a generative seminar in Ireland with real ground under her feet. Chloé Cooper Jones is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, once in Memoir for Easy Beauty and once in Feature Writing, and a Whiting Award winner who teaches at Columbia and writes for the New York Times Magazine. Her nonfiction cohort is a strong fit for essayists and memoirists working where the personal meets the philosophical. Thao Thai is the author of Banyan Moon, a multigenerational novel selected for Read with Jenna, and her fiction workshop suits writers building stories and novels that move across time and family.
Guiding the week are trip leaders Diana Spechler, a novelist and New York Times columnist who has led the Dublin retreat before, and Virginia Reeves, a Michener Center graduate whose debut, Work Like Any Other, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Worth noting: alumni of our programs have themselves been selected for Read with Jenna, signed with agents, and won the Halifax Prize and the Mary McCarthy Prize. In Dublin, one of the writers reading your pages was a Read with Jenna author herself.
The other writers are now friends and writing buddies. I left Dublin full of happy memories and with a stronger vision for my novel-in-progress.
– Jenn G., Writing Workshops Dublin participant
Curious what writers do after a week with us? Read where our alumni have published and who they have signed with.
See Alumni Success StoriesWhat Does the Week in Dublin Look Like?
The program runs six days and five nights, May 2 to 7, 2027. You stay in your own room at the four-star Iveagh Garden Hotel, with no roommate lottery and no shared bath, and daily breakfast is included in your tuition. The hotel is Europe's first fully sustainable hotel, which is a nice thing to know, though what you will notice is that everything worth walking to is already outside the door.
Mornings belong to the work: workshop sessions and one-on-one conferences, the reason you came. Afternoons hold optional cultural activities woven through the week, from literary walking tours and a visit to the coastal village of Howth that so moved Yeats, to the Long Room at Trinity College and the Museum of Literature Ireland. These are invitations, not obligations, and plenty of writers use an afternoon to stay in and write while the city is fresh in mind. Lunch and dinner are not included, which keeps your evenings open to Dublin. If you want more of Ireland, there is an optional three-day Southwest Ireland add-on from May 7 to 10, 2027.
How Do You Apply for the 2027 Dublin Writing Retreat?
Applications are open now. To apply, you submit a short purpose statement and a writing sample of up to 5,000 words. Fiction applicants should say in the purpose statement whether they are applying to Thao Thai's Fiction Workshop, the Fiction Master Class and Generative Seminar with Marie-Helene Bertino, or either. Nonfiction applicants apply to Chloé Cooper Jones's workshop.
The seats are genuinely limited. We cap each genre cohort at ten writers so the room stays intimate and the feedback stays sharp, and we accept on a rolling basis until each cohort fills, then open waitlists. There is no manufactured deadline here, only the real arithmetic of small rooms: the writers who apply early are the writers who get in. If Dublin is the week your work needs, the time to move is now.
Read the full program details, meet your faculty, and submit your application for a writing retreat in Ireland this May.
Apply for Writing Workshops Dublin 2027If you are weighing this against our other destination programs, you can compare dates and faculty across every writing retreat we offer, or read through the testimonials from writers who have already spent a week with us abroad. Dublin has a way of settling the question on its own.
About WritingWorkshops.com
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and New York Times bestsellers with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney's. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
