Jeanne Sutton has been awarded the spring 2026 bursary from The Ireland Funds Monaco and will be the Writer-in-Residence at the Princess Grace Irish Library from mid-February until St Patrick's Day.
About the speaker
Jeanne Sutton is an Irish writer. She was recently awarded the 2025 John McGahern Award for emerging Irish writers as part of the Iron Mountain Literature Festival and with the support of the McGahern Estate and Leitrim County Council. To date, her short stories have been published in the literary journal Banshee and she has a story forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, which is published by Duke University Press. In 2025, her speculative story 'The Dimmed Tide' was shortlisted for the Bournemouth Writing Prize and published in an accompanying anthology.
Jeanne is currently working on 'Monster Island', a historical novel set in 19th century Ireland and New Zealand. The opening pages of this work placed second in a competition at the Stockholm Writers Festival 2024. Jeanne is a recipient of a Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Emerging Artist Bursary 2024 and a 2023 Arts Council Agility Award. She was selected for the 2023 Irish Writers Centre’s National Mentoring Programme (Supporting body: Dún Laoghaire Rathdown Libraries) and The Stinging Fly Summer School 2023.
Main photo in black against clear background © Enda Rowan www.endarowan.com
Theme of the talk
Join our Writer-in-Residence Jeanne Sutton for her talk on the theme of Irish heroines in migrant fictions. Drawing on beloved novels and academic discussion, Jeanne will speak about what it is in these selected texts which compels readers and their impact on her own writing, and she will invite thoughts from the audience about what these stories tell us about Ireland of the past, present, and future.
This talk will be interspersed with readings from local amateur dramatists of the stories mentioned, as well as an excerpt of Jeanne’s novel-in-progress about a young woman who emigrates to New Zealand in the 1850s.
