The Stinging Fly

Join us as we celebrate the publication of The Stinging Fly Winter 2026-27 issue, featuring readings of the best new poetry and prose alongside conversation and connection🖤🥂

stingingfly.org/product/winter…

The Winter 2026-27 issue will launch on Thursday, December 3rd at 8PM in the Digital Hub, Dublin 8. This is a free event but capacity is limited and booking is essential.

You can now preorder the new issue on our website. 

The cover image is a photograph by Agata Stoinska from the series Echoes of a Dream, 2024. 

Book your ticket to the launch event and pre-order Issue 55.

We are excited to participate in two amazing @DublinBookFest events this week✨️📚

1.
Indie Press Celebration ⭐️
06 November, 7:30 - 9:30pm GMT | FREE
This Friday, The Stinging Fly publisher Declan Meade will host a lively panel discussion with Bridget Farrell (@bullaunpress ), Nathan O’Donnell (@pva_journal), and Stephen Reid (@LilliputPress) to discuss the challenges and joys of indie publishing and the voices and ideas shaping Ireland’s independent publishing scene.

Then discover some of the writers at the heart of this vibrant scene, with readings of newly published work from authors @AlaaQAlQaisi (@SkeinPress) (Alaa's essay “A Modest Proposal for the Final Management of Gaza” is available to read on our website), @LJSedgwick (@silverlocustpress), Mary Branley (@LepusPrint), Ruth Ennis @rurooie (@LittleIslandBks) and Sam Furlong (@machapress). MCed by award-winning author and activist Leon Diop.

dublinbookfestival.com/event/indie-pr…

NEW on our website this week:
An essay by Alaa Alqaisi, ‘A Modest Proposal for the Final Management of Gaza’.

“What Swift grasped with devastating clarity was that power does not always shout; it often speaks in the calm language of order, necessity, and public good, and in doing so renders its own cruelty intelligible, even acceptable.”

Read the full essay:
stingingfly.org/2026/10/29/a-m…

📸 by Alaa Alqaisi

Huge congratulations to Tara Bergin on winning the @ForwardPrizes for Best Single Poem – Written 2026.

‘The Fear’ by Tara Bergin was one of two published in Issue 52, Summer 2025 of @stingingfly magazine.

The judges said: ‘what was remarkable about 'The Fear' was its universality: it transmits across the generations and across experience, and that collective fear we all share about its legacy for those that follow. It's a simple poem and yet it does so much. It's not only timely; it's timeless.’

Tara says: ‘Many years ago I devised a poetry writing class called ‘Fear Poetry’. I got so interested in the whole idea I had to try it myself.’

NEW on our website this week:

Philip Ó Ceallaigh reviews From the Front Line. Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin: 1941–1945, a collection of wartime writing by Vasily Grossman (trans. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler) (@NYRB_Imprints)

“What makes Grossman’s journalism most disorienting as a historical record is not so much the horrors he describes as those he omits... This edition of From the Front Line is not only an astute account of the war but a fascinating study of Soviet deception.”

Read the full review
stingingfly.org/review/from-th…