Meath based writer, Geraldine Walsh  has been selected by the Irish Writers Centre as the county’s recipient of professional literary mentoring over the next eight months from an acclaimed Irish writer of their choice.

Geraldine Walsh from Garristown is an award-winning writer, freelance journalist, and author. She is a frequent contributor to The Irish Times on a range of topics in the women’s health, mental health, and parenting spaces and was twice shortlisted in the Headline Mental Health Media Awards in 2019 and 2023. She won the Realex Web Awards for Best Original Writing in 2016.

Her debut non-fiction, Unraveling Motherhood (Hatherleigh Press), is part memoir and considers motherhood a tightly woven knot of physical, mental, emotional, and social changes and then seeks to unravel that knot.

Geraldine finds herself returning to fiction after a fifteen-year hiatus. Previously, her fiction and poetry appeared in Boyne Berries, Toasted Cheese, Agenda, Dublin Quarterly, and others. She is working on her debut novel.

The Meath recipient award is supported by Meath Arts Office and the Arts Council of Ireland.

The mentoring process involves four 90-minute meetings between the selected mentee and their chosen professional writer. Each mentor reads up to 10,000 words / 180 lines of poetry of the awarded mentee’s writing in advance of all four meetings, sharing their kind and critical feedback with the mentee, face-to-face at each meeting. Mentors also provide broad professional advice, sharing the benefit of their years of experience.

The Irish Writers Centre’s mission is to support a vibrant and diverse community of writers of all types and talents to develop their craft, capacity and confidence to thrive as a writer in the world.

The hope for the National Mentoring Programme is that the chosen mentees will go on to write the next great works of literature with the support and sustenance of their chosen mentor.

It’s a form of peer-to-peer teaching that is increasingly popular in literary community, formalising the process whereby successful writers pass on their craft and experience to the next generation of writers across the island. 

Running since 2017, the programme now has numerous published authors among its alumni, including Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Fíona Scarlett, Will Keohane, Alice Kinsella and Victoria Kennefick to name just a few.