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English, Media and Creative Arts

Mr Mike Mc Cormack

Contact Details

Lecturer Above The Bar-Creative Writing
English
Arts Millennium Building
University of Galway
E: mike.mccormack@universityofgalway.ie

Biography

Mike McCormack lectures in Creative Writing and is the author of four novels - Crowe's Requiem (1998), Notes from a Coma (2005), Solar Bones (2016) and This Plague of Souls (2023) and two collections of short stories - Getting It in the Head (1996) and Forensic Songs (2012). He is the Director of the MA (Writing).
In 1996 his debut collection Getting it in the Head was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In 2006 Notes from a Coma was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award. In 2016 Solar Bones was awarded the Goldsmiths Prize and both the Irish Novel of the Year and Book of the Year Award; it was also long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. In 2018 it was awarded the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2022 a Rough Magic production of Solar Bones played successfully at the Abbey Theatre for ten days. His work has been translated into several languages and in 2019 he was elected to Aosdána.

Research Interests

I am a novelist and short story writer. My work in these forms is broadly realist but also shot through with a streak of strange - surreal, fantastic and conjectural... It takes its cue from the grand experiments of high-modernism - Joyce, Beckett and Flann O'Brien - while also acknowledging a debt to the virtues of genre fiction - crime, western, sci-fi and fantasy genres. The challenge is to draw these disparate elements into coherent artistic alignment.

My work in both the novel and short story has been a passionate enquiry into both the telling of stories and the ways we tell stories - the different structures, idioms and voices we use. From the beginning I have seen fiction as a place of play, conjecture and experiment in which I have tried to expand the received tradition into new narrative forms and thematic considerations.

In short, my interest in fiction writing is in exploring and examining those human truth's and possibilities in ways that only fiction can do.

Books

	Year	Publication
	(2023)	This Plague of Souls (Novel). Mike McCormack (2023) This Plague of Souls (Novel). Ireland, Britain, America: Tramp Press (Ireland), Canongate (England). [Details]
	(2016)	Solar Bones (Novel). Mike McCormack (2016) Solar Bones (Novel). Dublin: Tramp Press. [Details]
	(2012)	Forensic Songs (Short Stories). Mike McCormack (2012) Forensic Songs (Short Stories). Dublin: Lilliput Press. [Details]
	(2005)	Notes from a Coma (Novel). Mike McCormack (2005) Notes from a Coma (Novel). London: Jonathan Cape. [Details]
	(1998)	Crowe's Requiem (Novel). Mike McCormack (1998) Crowe's Requiem (Novel). London: Jonathan Cape. [Details]
	(1996)	Getting it in the Head (Short Stories). Mike McCormack (1996) Getting it in the Head (Short Stories). London: Jonathan Cape. [Details]

Honours and Awards

Year	Title	Awarding Body
2019	The Athens Prize for Literature (Shortlisted)	City of Athens
2016	Goldsmiths Prize	Goldsmiths, University of London
2018	International Dublin Literary Award (Winner)	Dublin City Council
2018	European Literature Prize (Longlisted)	European
2017	Booker Prize (Longlisted)	Booker Prize Foundation
2017	Republic of Consciousness Prize (Runner-up)	UEA Publishing Project/Granta Trust/Arts Council England
1996	Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (Winner)	The Rooney Family former Ambassador to Ireland, Dan Rooney

Professional Associations

	Association	Function	From / To
	Irish Writers Centre	Ambassador	01-JAN-19 / 31-DEC-22
	Aosdána	Member	01-NOV-19 /

Teaching Interests

My teaching interests lie in encouraging writers to explore all the possibilities of fiction writing and creative non-fiction with a mission to enable them find their way towards their own voice and their own thematic concerns.
As both teacher and writer I am also interested in exploring and developing the tradition of Irish science fiction.

Current Postgraduate Students (Research)

	Student	Degree Type	Type
	Eamon Doggett	Doctorate - Structured Ph.D. in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences	Supervisor
	Thomas Lally	Doctorate - Structured Ph.D. in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences	Co-supervisor (1)

Modules Taught

Term/Year	Module Title	Module Code	Subject / Desc
Sem 1 - 2003 - Present	Writing Workshop: Fiction	EN602
Semester 2 2016 - Present	Exploring Non-Fiction	CW102	A practical, workshop based class in which students explore by the historical and recent tradition of Creative Non-fiction with a view towards completing a project of their own devising.
Sem 2 2017 - Present	Contemporary Lit	ENG304
Sem 2, 2003 - Present	Writing Workshop: Fiction 2	EN6111
Sem 1 and Sem 2, 2016 - Present	Writer's Seminar	EN604
Semester 1 2016 - Present	The Forms of Fiction	CW101	A workshop based class in which students explore all the different ways in which prose fiction tells our stories.

External Collaborators

Name	Organisation / Institute	Country	Description of Collaboration
Dr El Putnam	Maynooth University	IRELAND	We have an artistic partnership which has seen us exhibit work in both university and gallery.
The Irish Writers Centre	The Irish Writers Centre	IRELAND	We have established a mentoring program for writers at the beginning of their career who wish to gain teaching experience at 3rd level.
Arts Council of Ireland	Arts Council of Ireland	IRELAND	We host a Writer-in-Residence on a yearly basis during which we give them workspace and mentor them in gaining teaching experience.