Bernie McGill is the author of two novels and two short story collections.
She has written audio scripts for heritage projects and stage scripts for theatre. Her second short story collection, This Train is For, was published by No Alibis Press in June 2022 and has recently been shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She is the current Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the School of Computer Science, Queen’s University, Belfast.

Listen to Bernie’s essay ‘Our Art’ (read by the author) on BBC Radio 3.

Listen to Bernie’s short story ‘Waiting for Joseph’ read by Julia Dearden on BBC Radio 4.

Bernie was born in Lavey in County Derry in Northern Ireland. She studied English and Italian at Queen’s University, Belfast and graduated with a Masters degree in Irish Writing. Her novel The Watch House was nominated in 2019 for the Ireland/European Union Prize for Literature and The Butterfly Cabinet was named in 2012 by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes as his novel of the year. Her first short story collection, Sleepwalkers, was short listed in 2014 for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her short fiction has been nominated for numerous awards and in 2008 she won the Zoetrope:All-Story Short Fiction Award in the US. Her work has been anthologised in award-winning collections The Long Gaze Back and The Glass Shore and more recently in The Black Dreams, Her Other Language, The Danger & the Glory, Belfast Stories and in Female Lines. She is a recipient of a number of Arts Council of Northern Ireland Awards, including an International Artists’ Development Fund Award to attend the Vittore Branca Centre at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in June 2023. She works as a Writing Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) and facilitates social sector projects with the RLF throughout the UK. She offers One-to-one Mentoring for fiction writers via the Irish Writers’ Centre and is available for school visits via Poetry Ireland’s Writers in Schools Programme. For public readings, writing workshops etc. check out Upcoming Events. You can contact Bernie directly here.