Newcastle Writers Festival and The University of Newcastle’s School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences are collaborating to offer a month-long intensive creative writing short course. The course is designed for writers eager to explore narrative nonfiction as a means of engaging with the environment, balancing artistry with advocacy and invites aspiring authors to reflect on their interactions with the natural world through a personal lens, while navigating the complex intersections of subjective experience and objective realities such as climate change, capitalism, and colonisation. It includes in-person workshops and weekly online conversations with authors. The course will be led by Keri Glastonbury (Newcastle Sonnets) and includes special guests Joanna Atherfold Finn (Plastic Free: The inspiring story of a global movement and why it matters), James Bradley (Deep Water: The World in the Ocean), and Lauren Fuge (Voyagers: Our journey into the anthropocene).

Join us for a wide-ranging conversation with award-winning Irish writer Colum McCann, author of American Mother and Apeirogon, and the new novel Twist – a darkly epic novel about connection, disconnection and destruction. Festival director Rosemarie Milsom will host the event. Colum McCann was born and raised in Dublin. He has been the recipient of many international awards and his work has been published in more than 40 languages. He is the author of novels Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon, which became a New York Times best-seller and won several major international awards. His first major non-fiction book, American Mother, was published in 2024 and centres on Diane Foley, the mother of photojournalist James Foley who was murdered by ISIS. McCann’s new book Twist is as taut and propulsive as a thriller, and a timeless exploration of narrative and truth. It is simply the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.