This workshop is part of the Seamus Heaney Centre’s Writing and the City Project, supported by the Queen’s Annual Fund.

Based on Jan’s two Postcard Story collections (Emma Press) the workshop will help you to craft a story in less than 300 words, turn everyday observations into little pieces of fiction and make your writing more concise and punchy. Spend some time looking at the work of other flash fiction writers and leave with a completed Postcard Story ready to send to a friend. Please bring a notebook, a pen and a semi-functional imagination.

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears and short story collection, Children’s Children, (Liberties Press), two micro-fiction collections, Postcard Stories 1 and 2 (Emma Press) and a short story collection, The Last Resort (Doubleday). Her novel The Fire Starters (Doubleday) won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019, the Kitschies Prize for Speculative Fiction 2020 and was shortlisted for the Dalkey Book Prize 2020. Jan won the Harper’s Bazaar short story competition in 2016 and has been shortlisted for the BBC National Story Prize (2020), Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize (2016) and the An Post Irish Short Story of the Year Award (2021). Jan’s latest novel, The Raptures was published by Doubleday in early 2022.