English, Media and Creative Arts

Elaine Feeney is a writer and lectures at the University of Galway. She writes poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction. She has published three poetry collections including The Radio was Gospel & Rise. Her debut novel As You Were won Dalkey Book Festival's Emerging Writer Prize, The Kate O' Brien Prize, The Society of Authors' McKitterick Prize, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. It was shortlisted the Rathbones-Folio Prize. She featured widely on Best of 2020 lists and Feeney was chosen by The Observer and The Guardian as a top ten debut novelist in that year. 

Her short fiction has been published in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Her work has been published widely including The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Poetry Review, The Shop, The Guardian, LitHub, Oxford Poetry, New England Review, Coppernickel, Stonecutter, BBC, RTÉ, Poetry Ireland Review and Five Dials.

How to Build a Boat, Feeney's second novel, was published in 2023. It was nominated for The Booker Prize, shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year and named Best Fiction of 2023 by The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, The Irish Times and won Tatler's Women's Award for Literature 2023.

Her creative output is informed by an inquiry into institutions: restorative justice, gender roles, trauma, illness, empathy in education, nationhood and working-class voices. She is co-founder of the Tuam Oral History Project at University of Galway, where she is responsible for Educational and Creative Output. The project records and archives the first-person narratives of those directly affected by the Tuam Mother and Baby Institution. Feeney was a post-primary teacher in Tuam for many years and was awarded Outstanding Achievement Award in 2020 by the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland. She was Fiction Fellow at University of East Anglia in 2023.

Her latest poetry collection All the Good Things You Deserve was published in 2024 by Harvill Secker / Vintage. She is currently working on a stage play, TADHG.

Feeney is a graduate of University College Galway, University College Cork and University of Limerick.