Dean Fee & Emily Cooper Read Danielle McLaughlin & Matthew Sweeney

The Stinging Fly Podcast

On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by Dean Fee and Emily Cooper to discuss their work as writers and editors of The Pig's Back. Read and discussed on the podcast are Danielle McLaughlin’s short story, 'Night of the Silver Fox’ originally published in Issue 23, Volume 2 of The Stinging Fly, and Mathew Sweeney's poem, 'Donegal', originally published in Issue 37, Volume 2 of The Stinging Fly.

Dean Fee is a writer from Cavan. His short fiction and non-fiction has been published in The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Banshee and The Tangerine. He has received two Literature Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland. He was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Foundation Award in 2021 and was editor-in-residence at the Regional Cultural Centre Letterkenny, in 2022. He is represented by Zoë Waldie at RCW and is the managing editor of The Pig’s Back literary journal.

Emily Cooper is a poet and writer based in Donegal. Her work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Winter Papers, London Magazine and others. She was a 2019 recipient of the Next Generation Award and has been awarded three Literature Bursaries by the Arts Council of Ireland. Her poetry collection Glass was published by Makina Books in 2021 and The Conversation, a collaborative collection written with Jo Burns will be published this year by Doire Press. She is represented by Harriet Moore at David Higham Associates and an editor for The Pig’s Back literary journal.

Danielle McLaughlin is the author of the short-story collection, Dinosaurs on Other Planets, and the novel, The Art of Falling, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. She has been Writer in Residence at University College Cork and Visiting Writer Fellow at the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College, Dublin. She has also designed and delivered workshops in Creative Writing for various organisations and festivals and currently mentors a number of emerging writers.

Matthew Sweeney (1952-2018) was born in Lifford, County Donegal. His poetry collections include A Dream of Maps (1981), A Round House (1983), The Lame Waltzer (1985), Blue Shoes (1989), Cacti (1992), The Bridal Suite (1997), A Smell of Fish (2000), Selected Poems (2002), Sanctuary (2004), Black Moon (2007), The Night Post: A Selection (Salt, 2010), Horse Music (2013), Inquisition Lane (2015), My Life as a Painter (2018), King of a Rainy Country (2018), and Shadow of the Owl (2020). His work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and won the inaugural Pigott Poetry Prize. He was a member of Aosdána.

Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast’s theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available to subscribers.