Photo Credit: Justin Yee
Ethel Rohan’s second novel, SING, I, pubished from TriQuarterly Books (April, 2024). She is also the author of In the Event of Contact (2021), winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize, the Gold IPPY Award for Best European Fiction, and the Eric Hoffer Short Story Collection Award.
Her debut novel The Weight of Him (St. Martin’s Press and Atlantic Books, 2017) was an Amazon, Bustle, KOBO, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book. The novel won a Plumeri Fellowship, Silver Nautilus Award, the Northern California Publishers and Authors’ Award, and was shortlisted for the Reading Women Award.
From Dublin, Ireland, Rohan hosts Bookshop West Portal’s Irish Authors Interview series. Past guests include such luminaries as Colm Tóibín, Kevin Barry, Donal Ryan, and Louise Kennedy. She also curates the bookshop’s national Irish Book Box subscription service. Most recent writing residencies include Faberllull, Olot; Pavilion Theatre Studio, Dublin; and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig.
She is also the author of two short story collections, Goodnight Nobody and Cut Through the Bone, the former longlisted for The Edge Hill Prize and the latter longlisted for The Story Prize. She wrote, too, the award-winning chapbook Hard to Say (PANK, Editor Roxane Gay) and the award-winning e-memoir single, Out of Dublin (Shebooks, Editor Laura Fraser).
Rohan was longlisted for The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, winner of the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Award, and shortlisted for the CUIRT, Roberts, and Bristol Short Story Prizes. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, World Literature Today, The Washington Post, Tin House, The Irish Times, LitHub, Writer’s Digest, and The Stinging Fly, among many others. She has reviewed books for New York Journal of Books and elsewhere.
Her stories have also published in various anthologies including Without You: Living With Loss (Ballpoint Press, 2018); Reading the Future: New Writing from Ireland (Arlen House, 2018); THE LINEUP: 20 Provocative Women Writers (Black Lawrence Press, 2015); Winesburg, Indiana (Indiana University Press, 2015); DRIVEL: Deliciously Bad Writing by Your Favorite Authors (Penguin: Perigee, 2014). She is also a contributor and associate editor to the anthology Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton, 2015).
Rohan has taught writing or was a featured author at Listowel Writers’ Week; Belfast Book Festival; The London Short Story Festival; The Abroad Writers’ Conference; the Bay Area Book Festival; the Los Gatos-Listowel Writers’ Week; the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival; Book Passage Corte Madera; San Francisco State University; The Writers Grotto; San Francisco Writers’ Conference; Green Mountain Writers’ Conference; among others. Rohan received her MFA in fiction from Mills College, Oakland, and is a member of the Writers Grotto, San Francisco.