2650 Fiction Tutored Retreat with Louise Welsh and Zoë Strachan, guest reader Eimear McBride

Join us for an end of year break to find inspiration in a peaceful, supportive environment. This tutored retreat is ideal if you want to focus intensively on your work in progress: any kind of prose writing is welcome! Louise and Zoë will be on hand to help you hone characters and structure, develop style, shift blocks and think about next steps. Immerse yourself in your writing and leave with more words to work with!

Our guest reader Eimear McBride will be joining us for an evening reading and Q&A in the middle of the week.

Tutors

Louise Welsh works in several forms including novels, short stories, opera libretti, radio and performance. She has written eleven novels, most recently The Cut Up (Canongate Books 2026). Louise is editor of Yonder Awa, a poetry anthology on the theme of Scotland and the North Atlantic slave trade by Scottish and Caribbean writers and Ghost, One Hundred Stories to Read with the Lights On. She is co-director (with Jude Barber) of the Empire Café, an award-winning collective exploring Scotland’s relationship with empire. Their current project is the podcast Who Owns the Clyde. Louise has collaborated on four critically acclaimed operas with composer Stuart MacRae. She has received several awards and international fellowships, including an honorary fellowship from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and honorary doctorates from the Open University and Edinburgh Napier University. Louise is Professor of Creative Writing at University of Glasgow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Literature. 

Zoë Strachan is an award-winning novelist and librettist, who also writes short fiction, essays and plays, including for BBC Radio. She has a longstanding sound art collaboration with composer Nichola Scrutton, and has edited six anthologies of new writing. In 2020, Zoë was a judge for the Dublin International Literary Award, and her most recent novel, Catch The Moments as They Fly came out in 2023. She lives in Glasgow, where her day job is as Reader in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. 

Guest reader

Eimear McBride is the author of four novels: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, The Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel and The City Changes Its Face. She held the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading and is the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Goldsmiths Prize, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Kerry Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.  In 2018 she was named in the top ten writers, working in English, by The Times Literary Supplement. She is from the west of Ireland and lives in London.