We’re very excited to welcome Mary-Jane Holmes to the Retreat West team.

Mary-Jane is an award-winning prose and poetry writer. As well as working with Retreat West she is also chief editor at Fish Publishing, Ireland; consulting editor at The Well Review poetry journal based in Cork; a guest editor at V. Press; and creative director at the Casa Ana Writing Retreat in Granada, Spain.

In recent years she has won the 2018 Mslexia Flash Fiction Competition, 2017 Bridport Poetry Prize, the Martin Starkie Poetry Prize, the Bedford International Poetry Prize and the Dromineer Flash Fiction Prize. Her poetry collection Heliotrope with Matches and Magnifying Glass, was published in 2018 by Pindrop Press to wide acclaim.

Mary-Jane’s work has been published in The Best Small Fictions Anthology 2016 and 2018, Mslexia, Reflex Fiction, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Prole, The Tishman Review, The Lonely Crowd and Firewords Quarterly. She holds a first class honours Masters of Studies in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford, and is embarking on a PhD in poetry and translation at Newcastle university. Her supervisors are Sinéad Morrissey and Tara Bergin.

Later this year, Mary-Jane and I will launch a new Flash Weekender online course that we have designed together (bookings open later this month for the first Autumn weekend) before hosting live flash workshops together from 2020 in various locations around the UK. Plus lots of other exciting co-projects that are in development.

Mary-Jane is also designing a new online memoir-in-flash writing course for Retreat West and more info will be available on that soon…