For only in praising is my heart still mine,

so violently do I know the world....

-Rainer Maria Rilke

I write from perception rather than expression. I’m less interested in what a story concludes than in what it’s like to stand inside a particular consciousness, at a particular pitch of attention; to really know something, in Rilke’s sense: violently, fully, before it has been organised into learning, if at all.

This is, I hope, a kind of praise—not the sentimental or evaluative kind (good/bad), but the disciplined kind. My aspiration as an artist is to render a thing faithfully, to hold a perception steady long enough to get its shape right, and to attend to both the devotion and the danger of the holding.

I return again and again to the question of what it is like to be someone else, how another consciousness works, what happens when I enter a world that isn’t mine. I perceive literature as a window rather than a mirror: not a place to find myself confirmed or denied, but a place to be genuinely met by what is unfamiliar.

My work explores landscapes that are ecologically fragile, morally unsettled and volatile. I’m particularly interested in institutional landscapes such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals, and, differently, in islands and remote villages, where human beings are decentred by scale and distance.

Part of my process involves prolonged nomadism and solitude, and another part involves deep social and creative engagement within community. I do not seek to make an argument about where I land, but to see places and people as clearly and as strangely as I can, while staying answerable to the many limits of this aspiration.

Contact Details:

I’m no longer on social media; you can catch me by email: srbyrne@gmail.com

Writer Awards & Residencies

• Literature Bursary, The Arts Council of Ireland (2026)
• Swerve Writer-in-Residence (2025)
• Design & Craft Council of Ireland Award (2023)
• Literature Bursary, The Arts Council of Ireland (2022)
• UNESCO Dublin Writer Award (2022)
• Digital Writer-in-Residence, West Cork Literary Festival (2021)
• Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation Writer Award (2021)
• UNESCO Dublin Award for Poetry Day in Prisons (2019)
• Literature Bursary, The Arts Council of Ireland (2016)
• Tyrone Guthrie Residency, Cork County Council (2016 & 2017)
• Travel & Training Award, The Arts Council of Ireland (2016)
• 2nd Prize, Fish Poetry Competition (2016)
• Individual Artists Bursary Award, Cork City Council (2015).
• 1st Prize, Doolin Poetry Competition (2015)

Publisher Awards (as founder and editor of The Well Review)

• Literature Capacity Building Support, The Arts Council of Ireland (2021)
• Arts Grant Funding Literature, The Arts Council of Ireland (2018, 2020, 2021)
• Arts Grant Funding, Cork County Council (2019)

Education

• Master of Studies in Creative Writing: University of Oxford (2017)
• Master of Philosophy in Criminology: University of Cambridge (2008)
• Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and German (Specialisation: Criminology): Trinity College Dublin (2007)

I’ve also completed extensive professional training in forensic medicine, mental health counselling, independent mental health advocacy, arts administration and am a certified restorative justice mediator.