Both Fighting Words North West and Fighting Words Wicklow have been featured in the local press recently - in the Wicklow People and the Donegal Post.
Fighting Words has expanded to different locations around the country in the last three years, offering free creative writing workshops to children and young people in Belfast, Cork, Galway, Mayo, the Northwest (Donegal/Sligo/Leitrim) and Wicklow - with more locations on the way!
At our recent 9th birthday party, we celebrated nine years of incredible stories and creativity, all made possible by our amazing volunteer writing tutors and story illustrators.
Our longest-serving volunteers were presented with beautiful commemorative medals made by silversmith Séamus Gill and based on Jim Fitzpatrick's specially desgined Fighting Words logo.
For more information about Séamus Gill's work, visit http://www.seamusgill.com/index.html
A gripping thriller called The Search, written and illustrated by almost 100 Irish school children at Fighting Words workshops across the island of Ireland, was launched at Fighting Words in Dublin on Friday, 26 January 2018.
The Search was created as part of The Big Picture project, an initiative of Laureate na nÓg PJ Lynch in collaboration with Fighting Words and Fighting Words Belfast.
It is with great sadness that we mourn our wonderful friend and former colleague Brian Ruane. Brian was a lifelong advocate for education and human rights, who did so much for so many. We offer our deepest sympathies to his wife Beth and daughter Saorla and the rest of Brian's family. We mourn together with them and Brian's wide circle of friends and colleagues from St Patrick's College/DCU, Trócaire and Amnesty International, among many others. May he rest in peace.
Programmes resume in the Dublin centre on January 8th.
Fighting Words launched their new book, Dublin In The Coming Times on Wednesday 29 November 2017 in Dublin City Library & Archive to a packed audience of aspiring and established writers and illustrators. The book features a selection of short stories, poetry and prose from members of Dublin City Libraries Creative Writing groups alongside writings from well known established authors.
In his 1893 collection, ‘The Rose’, WB Yeats included the poem ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’. Borrowing its title, Dublin in the Coming Times was a free, citywide programme of creative writing in which Dubliners, young and old, created their own stories and poems as they looked to the future of their city.
We recently had the opportunity to work with writers from over 20 countries at Failte Isteach Tyrrelstown!
The group meets weekly for conversational English and on 29 November they wrote their first story together. They are supported by a great team of volunteers and by Fingal County Council at Tyrrelstown Community Centre.
The authors came from Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Poland, Moldova, Russia, Spain, India, Brazil. Albania, Libya, Sweden, Dominican Republic, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and of course Ireland.
He met 5th year students from St. Joseph’s Secondary School in Castlebar at a workshop at the National Museum of Ireland - Country Life, service users at The Adult Training Centre in Castlebar, and of course the brilliant volunteer tutors and co-ordinators from Castlebar and Ballina.
Fighting Words was delighted to take part in the Jonathan Swift 350 Festival on Saturday, 25 November 2017.
We brought together 20 10-12 year olds to St Patrick's Cathedral to create a new story, which was started together and finished individually.
No doubt that Dean Swift would have been very impressed indeed with the imagination of the participants and their ideas!
The supplement Children's Rights, Children's Writing was published in The Irish Times on 20 November 2017.
Produced in conjunction with the Office of the Ombudsman for Children, young writers from around Ireland wrote creative responses to each of the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was ratified by Ireland in 1992.
