Editing, publishing, mentoring
I began working professionally in publishing in 2009, starting my career with The Lilliput Press.
In 2011, I joined The Stinging Fly as Assistant Editor and worked on a number of issues of the magazine, as well as short story collections published by The Stinging Fly Press.
I became Editor of the magazine in 2014. The Stinging Fly has an open submissions policy – anyone can submit work to the magazine, and it’s from these submissions that the magazine puts together each issue.
During my editorship, I read thousands of short stories and worked with hundreds of writers.
It was a privilege to read all this fiction and poetry, and to edit and nurture so many superb writers – a number of whom have since gone on to publish books of their own.
Around this time, I devised and edited an anthology called Dubliners 100, which invited fifteen contemporary Irish writers to write ‘cover versions’ of the original stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners.
The book was published by Tramp Press and won the Best Irish-published Book at the 2014. Irish Book Awards.
After the publication of my debut story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, I stepped aside as Stinging Fly editor to focus on my own writing and to gain further experience in teaching and mentoring. I became Writer in Residence at University College, Cork, where I taught on the MA in Creative Writing and ran a college-wide fiction workshop.
Before long, I returned to The Stinging Fly as a Contributing Editor, and sometime later as Editor at Large, where I ran the organisation’s Writer Development Programme; mentored a number of emerging writers; commissioned and edited fiction, essays, and literary criticism; presented episodes of the podcast; co-founded The Stinging Fly/FBA New Fiction Prize, and helped develop the organisation’s first ever strategy.
Throughout these years, I discovered that working directly with writers was what really excited me about working in publishing. In 2023, after the publication of my second book, Open Up, and after twelve years of working with the Stinging Fly, I made the decision to go freelance, so that I could better focus my professional energies on two things: my own writing, and my ever-evolving practice as a mentor.
Nowadays I work with writers on an independent basis and through state-funded initiatives such as the National Mentoring Programme.
Tom’s encouragement of new and emerging writers has been such a foundational part of literary culture here in Ireland over the last ten years that it’s difficult to know where we would be without it. Speaking personally, I quite literally don’t know where I would be without him.
—Sally Rooney
Books I’ve worked on in recent years
