Our 2025 Creatives

Cara Loftus is a screenwriter working across film and television. This workshop will examine writing for the visual medium, and taking your story from idea to script.

Every songwriter is a poet, but not every poet could write a song. Leonard Cohen came to songwriting from a poetry background. Other renowned songwriters who are known for their poetry include: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Kurt Cobain, PJ Harvey, Tupac Shakur and yer man from Picture This.   When writing a song, there are a lot of elements to consider alongside lyrics - structure, tone, melody, dynamics & accompaniment. Songwriting is a craft, and there are only a handful of masters around the world. Understanding these different elements is certainly a good way to get started.  Join Waterford songwriter Tadhg Williams in a discussion of how to best blend these elements together. This workshop is aimed at exploring how your writing can best be told through song, investigating how to serve your story.

Join award–winning Young Adult author Adiba Jaigirdar for a creative writing workshop, perfect for complete beginners or aspiring authors. You will learn writing tips and participate in writing exercises to help unleash your creativity.

Join bestselling author Derek Landy, creator of the Skulduggery Pleasant series, for a lively Q&A with the young Lit Festival Co-Organisers. Expect sharp wit, behind-the-scenes stories, and insights into building worlds filled with magic, mystery, and mayhem. Bring your questions and get ready for an unforgettable conversation with one of Ireland’s most beloved writers.

This generative workshop invites you to celebrate the loved ones who shape your world, be it a parent, a friend, a dog, or even a cherished barista. We will look to poets like Chen Chen, Safia Elhillo, and Mícheál McCann, who write with specificity and authenticity, transforming ordinary details into powerful and resonant poems. Through guided exercises, we will experiment with metaphor, list-making, and strange turns of phrase to move beyond cliché into the unique joy and complexity of our relationships. My hope is that you will surprise yourself, writing deeply into the experience of being someone’s sibling, child, or friend, and discover how that relationship has transformed your own sense of self.

Learn to build your own safe space word by word. We'll be exploring joy and comfort in stories, books and poems and learning how to infuse our own writing with joy and comfort. Open to all levels!

At The Lit Young Writers Festival 2025, Momo will lead a dynamic workshop using the humble flipbook to unlock visual storytelling. Participants will be guided through a spontaneous, resourceful approach to storyboarding – refining big ideas into small, powerful moments. The goal is to think creatively, break a few storytelling “rules,” and stay open to experimentation. Each participant will create their own flipbook – a portable, handmade story they can take home as a personal time capsule of the festival. No prior drawing or animation experience is required– just curiosity, imagination, and a willingness to play.