Sarah Byrne
Sarah Byrne is a writer and creative producer from Cork, Ireland. Before founding The Disaster School in 2025, she spent a decade working in mental health and counselling, specialising in offender rehabilitation in prisons and high-secure hospitals. Her career includes roles with the human rights organisation Reprieve in New Orleans, Broadmoor and the Maudsley Hospitals in the UK, and Shine Ireland. From 2014 to 2017, she was recruited to establish a pilot restorative justice project in Cork, funded by the Irish Probation Service.
A first-generation college graduate and neurodivergent, Sarah studied at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford. A lifelong advocate for social change, she has raised funds for numerous charities, including running two full marathons. She has also volunteered with Aware, Hometree, Reprieve, Simon, and TRIAL. Alongside her human rights and mental health work, Sarah has built an acclaimed literary career as a poet. Her work has been widely published and recognised with over ten awards and prizes.
From 2016 to 2023, she founded and editedThe Well Review, an annual arts journal featuring Irish and international artists and writers, including Paul Muldoon, Sinéad Morrissey, and Anne Carson. For Issue Three, she curated a feature on post-war Bosnian women’s poetry in translation. Sarah has taught creative and critical writing for Columbia Global Centre (Paris), The Poetry School, and the West Cork Literary Festival, and presented The Munster Literature Centre Poetry Podcast from 2022-23.
The Disaster School distils her experiences across psychology, philosophy, and the literary arts into a community that writes for change.
sarahbyrnewrite.com 