Faber and Faber has published Irish writers from Samuel Beckett to Seamus Heaney to Sebastian Barry. Now it is going to teach aspiring writers how to join their ranks.
The Faber Academy will begin a six-month course Writing a Novel from Start to Finish in Dublin next month. It also has plans to offer a poetry-writing course next year.
The novel-writing course, based at the Winding Stair bookshop on Ormond Quay, will take the form of weekly evening workshops and monthly day-long seminars on Saturdays.
Writers such as Anne Enright, Joseph O'Connor, Hugo Hamilton, Claire Keegan and Claire Kilroy will be among the guest lecturers and will address issues such as plotting, editing and presenting your novel.
The course directors are James Ryan, whose most recent novel South of the Border was short listed for the 2008 Kerry Group Literary prize, and writer and critic Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.
Some 16 places are available on the course, but one participant chosen on merit will be awarded a fellowship and will not have to pay the €3,000 fee.
Patrick Keogh, head of the Faber Academy, said Ireland was chosen as a venue for the course because Faber and Faber had long-standing links with the country and had published some of the finest Irish writers.
"It always strikes me as a place that is wrapped up in the idea of storytelling, both the written and the spoken word," he said.
The course was aimed at everybody, he said, but participants were chosen based on the quality of work they submitted.
All applicants must send a sample of their prose fiction no longer than 1,000 words to the Faber Academy before September 11th.
Mr Keogh said the course offered no magic formula to becoming a published writer but it hoped to help new writers reach a point where they had sufficient material and know-how to complete a first draft.
He said the final weeks of the course would bring students into contact with editors, literary agents and other publishing contacts.
The Faber Academy has been offering similar courses in Britain for almost a year and most of them have sold out quickly. Asked what the reaction might be in Ireland, he said "it's a suck it and see moment. I hope there's an appetite for it. If there's an appetite for it, we'll do another one."
Interest in Irish writers from British publishers has increased in recent years. Earlier this week, it was announced that Puffin, the children's imprint of the Penguin publishing group, was setting up in Ireland. And Random House began an Irish imprint, Transworld Ireland, in 2007,
Applications close next Friday for the course which starts on October 7th. See www.faberacademy.co.uk for more details.
