Fingal County Council Arts Office partnered with Word’s Ireland to provide professional development opportunities to support Fingal writers through the Word’s Ireland National Mentoring Programme. Four local writers, Niamh Donnelly, Mark Kielty, Shauna Smullen and Lisa Walsh have been selected by Words Ireland to receive professional literary mentoring over the next eight months from an acclaimed Irish writer of their choice.Niamh Donnelly is a writer from Dublin. Her fiction has been published in The Irish Times, The Ogham Stone, The Dublin Review, and elsewhere. She is also an arts journalist and was shortlisted for Critic of the Year at the 2019 Newsbrands Ireland Journalism Awards. She is currently working on a novel, provisionally titled Onboarding. Her writing focuses on any varied themes such as ambition, and also disillusion and cultural change.Mark Kielty is a Dublin based author who has already been published in four anthologies with his writing group, Cupán Fae. In 2021, he published his first short comic in Turning Roads: Irish Folklore Stories with Limit Break Comics. He writes mostly fantasy along with sci-fi, and superhero stories. When he’s not writing, he’s playing hurling or volunteering as a basketball coach with the Special Olympics. Also He is also currently working very hard on writing his first ever full length novel. Shauna Smullen is the co-editor of The Liminal Review. She is working on a collection of short stories about the effects of physical and emotional trauma on the body. Her intriguing and very interesting work has most recently was piblished and appeared in The Madrigal and also This is Not Where I Belong.Last but not least is Lisa Walsh is an emerging working class writer from Ballymun, now living in Santry. She began writing as a participant on the Write On course facilitated by Colm Keegan, in the Axis, Ballymun in 2013 at the age of 43. Most recently, she has completed the Stinging Fly’s six-month fiction workshop 2020, as run, in association with the Irish Writers Centre. Lisa is a playwright and is in the process of developing and furthering her skills as a novel and short story writer, creating new writing based on both her experiences growing up in Ballymun and as a professionally qualified social worker.