If you wanted to trace the origins of the most exciting Irish fiction of the past two decades, you could do worse than follow the thread back to a single magazine. Not a prestigious literary quarterly with centuries of history, not a university journal with an endowed chair behind it, but a small, stubbornly independent publication that started in Dublin in the late 1990s because a young man trying to write short stories noticed there was nowhere to publish them.
Declan Meade had moved to Dublin in 1995. He was taking courses at the Irish Writers Centre, joining writing groups, meeting other people who shared the same frustration: there were writers, there were stories, but the outlets for new work were vanishingly few. His friend Aoife Kavanagh had just finished a Masters in Literature and Publishing in Galway and was looking for practical experience. Together, they decided to build the thing they were missing. The first issue of The Stinging Fly appeared in March 1998.
Kavanagh left after two issues to pursue a career in education, and Meade was on his own. For the next six years he produced eighteen issues, working part-time on the magazine while holding down other jobs. By 2004, he was exhausted. He took a break, travelled, and — as he has candidly admitted — toyed with the idea of giving it all up. The magazine had built a small, devoted readership and a reputation for publishing genuinely exciting new work, but running an independent literary journal in Ireland on willpower and Arts Council funding is not a career path that rewards the faint-hearted.
He came back. In 2005, The Stinging Fly relaunched with a new format, a new volume numbering, and a new ambition: a book publishing arm, The Stinging Fly Press. The first title was Watermark by Sean O'Reilly. Two years later, the press published There Are Little Kingdoms, the debut story collection from Kevin Barry. It won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. In 2013, they published Young Skins by Colin Barrett, which proceeded to win the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, The Guardian First Book Award, and the Rooney Prize. In 2012, Mary Costello's The China Factory was longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award. The press went on to publish landmark debut collections by Claire-Louise Bennett, Wendy Erskine, Nicole Flattery, Danielle McLaughlin, and Cathy Sweeney. Almost all of these writers have since moved on to larger publishing houses — which is, in a sense, the whole point.
The list of writers who made their debuts in the magazine's pages reads like a syllabus for a course in contemporary Irish fiction: Sally Rooney, Nicole Flattery, Sara Baume, Rob Doyle, Colin Barrett, Wendy Erskine, Oisín Fagan. As Rob Doyle once put it, publication in The Stinging Fly was the moment he became a writer not just in his own eyes, but in the eyes of the world.
Then there is the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award, which The Stinging Fly organised every five years between 2004 and 2014 — a prize for a single short story, judged by people like Richard Ford, Anne Enright, and Yiyun Li. The 2004 inaugural winner was Anne Enright. The 2009 winner was Claire Keegan for "Foster" — a story that would later become the basis for the film The Quiet Girl, Ireland's first ever Oscar-nominated Irish-language feature. Not a bad legacy for a prize run by a tiny magazine.
What is remarkable about The Stinging Fly is not just the talent it has discovered but the seriousness with which it treats the process. The magazine has an open submissions policy — they read everything that is sent to them. They work with every writer to edit their stories, essays and poems before publication. Every contributor is paid. These are not radical propositions, but in the world of small literary magazines, where exposure is often offered in place of money and editorial attention is a luxury, they amount to a statement of principle.
The editorial chair has itself become a kind of launching pad. Thomas Morris, author of We Don't Know What We're Doing, edited the magazine from 2014 to 2016. Sally Rooney — yes, that Sally Rooney — was editor from December 2017 to January 2019, and now chairs the board. Lisa McInerney, the Baileys Prize-winning novelist, took over as editor in 2022. The pattern is clear: the magazine draws in writers at the beginning of something, and by the time they leave, that something has arrived.
Twenty-seven years in, The Stinging Fly publishes two issues a year, runs fiction workshops with the Irish Writers Centre, maintains a podcast hosted by Nicole Flattery, and continues to operate its press. The New York Times once called it "something of a revelation in Irish literature." That is true, but it understates the case. The magazine has not merely revealed Irish literature — it has, quietly and persistently, helped to shape it.
Declan Meade is still there, now as publisher and chief executive. He almost walked away in 2004. It is worth pausing to consider how much poorer Irish writing would be if he had.
Explore The Stinging Fly at <a href="https://stingingfly.org/" target="\_blank">stingingfly.org