Michelle Walshe was born in England, but lives in Dublin, Ireland. She began writing in 2017. Since then her work has been published in literary journals – Loft Books, Eat the Storms, Púca magazine, Ellipsis Zine, in newspapers – the Irish Times, the Irish Examiner, The Sunday Independent, News Four, The Dublin People, The Telegraph, in anthologies – Teachers Who Write, Same Page, Cork Words 3, and the bestseller, A Page from My Life, magazines – The Gloss, Woman’s Way, Pharmanord Health. Her work is online on Writing.ie, SkelligMichael.com, IrishTimes.com, IrishExaminer.com, Silverbirchpress.wordpress.com, KanturkArts.ie, Pendemic.ie, TheCabinetofHeed.com and Athensinsider.com. In 2023 her work was broadcast on RTE Radio One as part of the Keywords series and she has been interviewed twice about her writing on the Ray D’Arcy Show.
Her work has been awarded the 2022 Jeannine Cooney scholarship for excellence in fiction at the Giacomo Leopardi Writing Conference, the 2020 Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, the 2021 Emerging Artist Award from Dun Laoghaire County Council.
She has been awarded bursaries and residencies to the John Hewitt Summer School, Armagh, in 2018, Greywood Arts, Cork, Carer’s bursary in 2019, a bursary to The Festival of Women’s Writing at the Bronte Parsonage, Haworth, UK in 2019, a residency at Tin Jug Studio, Co. Offaly in 2019, residencies to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Co. Monaghan in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
She has been a recipient of Creative Ireland, Dun Laoghaire Arts and The Arts Council of Ireland funding programmes.
Her short stories have shortlisted in the Benedict Kiely Short Story Competition in 2018, the Kilmore Quay Literary Festival 2019, 2020 and 2021 and have been published in Loft Books Volumes 2, 3 and 4, Púca Literary Journal, Eat the Storms Literary Journal, and Cork Words 3.
Her flash fiction won third prize in Kanturk Arts Festival in 2019 and second prize in 2021 and is published in Loft Books, the Cabinet of Heed and Ellipsis Zine.
Her creative non-fiction is published in the Same Page Anthology, Teachers Who Write Anthology, the Irish Times and on Writing.ie, Pendemic.ie and Athensinsider.com.
She is writing her first novel which was highly commended in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022 and was in the top 10% of 997 entries to the Cheshire Novel Prize, UK.
Michelle Walshe is on Twitter @thesparklyshell.
The Sparkly Shell 