Editor Interview: Irish Pages

Irish & Overseas Writing

Irish Pages will publish writing of a similar standard to that found in Granta, The Paris Review and London Review of Books.

Favorite Fiction Writer: W.G. Sebald.
Favourite Poet: Seamus Heaney.

Ireland’s premier literary journal, combining a large general readership with outstanding writing from Ireland and overseas. Variously described as “a wonderful achievement” (Michael Longley); “a major development in Irish literature” (John F. Deane); and “the most important cultural journal in Ireland at the present moment” (Jonathan Allison). Offering an unrivalled window on the literary and cultural life of these islands – and further afield.
Our policy is to publish poetry, short fiction, essays, creative non-fiction, memoir, essay reviews, nature-writing, translated work, literary journalism, and other autobiographical, historical, religious and scientific writing of literary distinction. There are no standard reviews or narrowly academic articles. Irish Language and Ulster Scots writing are published in the original with English translations or glosses.
Each issue assembles a carefully edited mix of English and Irish, prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, style and subject matter, in an overall fit aimed at a wide range of reading tastes.
We wish the journal to be read widely and each issue’s careful mix of genres and styles is essential to the magazine’s appeal outside the ghetto of the literati.There is an especial commitment – uniquely for Ireland and perhaps Britain, at least in a literary journal – to nature/ecological writing as well as ‘creative non-fiction’/the essay.And although each issue will carry at least one and often two pieces of fiction, part of the thinking behind this mix is to provide an antidote or alternative to the enormous critical and commercial attention that is given to the various genres of fiction, at the expense clearly of other genres, whose
historical/ ethical/social value is surely no less.
One wider background aim is to give the journal a distinctly dissident edge, to inhabit ‘the space outside’ the Pale of the Received – business-as-usual in all its (especially Western) forms: literary, intellectual, cultural,
social, political.Thus, the journal has a particular (though hardly exclusive) commitment to work informed by ‘the ethical imagination’. We believe that there is a huge thirst for this kind of writing – writing of ‘high
artistic consciousness’, but in the thick of the world and its dilemmas – and that it is immensely important for our increasingly complex global life.You might call it the literary equivalent of an NGO audience: all those potential readers for whom ethical issues count.

Submissions can be made at any time. For a variety of reasons, we accept only postal submissions (with stamp, coupons or cash, though no self-addressed envelope is needed). We advise all potential contributors to visit our new website (www. irishpages.org) or request a brochure for general information, and/or to familiarize themselves with a copy of the journal. It is available at independent booksellers and several chain bookshops throughout Ireland and Great Britain, or can be ordered online. No more than eight poems or two prose pieces should be submitted at one time, or within any six-month period. The Editors aim to respond within eight months.

Outstanding writing in any genre.

We do not accept email submissions under any circumstances.

We request that every submission be accompanied by a standard and concise biographical note, including prior book/periodical publications (if applicable). However, equal editorial attention will be given to established, emergent and new writers.

The editors personally read all submissions in full. Submissions are not screened by pre-editorial "readers", as is the practice with some journals.

There are two stages in the selection process: a preliminary selection and a final selection. With the final selection, issues of space and overall thematic "fit" are sometimes germane. All submissions should be carefully proof-read and professionally presented. Our "house-style" follows that of the Times Literary Supplement, rather than what is known as "Oxford Style" (i.e., the "house-style" of the London Review of Books).

Pressurized!
Of course, time is set aside for manuscripts to be read and re-read in a quiet and tranquil environment.