Oisín McKenna was awarded a London Writers Award in 2022. His novel Evenings and Weekends, described by both Dazed and The Evening Standard as ‘the book of the summer’, was published in 2024 by 4th Estate (UK) and Mariner Books (US).

Oisín was one of the judges of the 2025 London Writers Awards. He gave a speech to the awardees at the first event of the ten month programme.

We’re pleased to be able to share his speech here in full. Thank you, Oisín.

“Hello. Thanks so much to Spread the Word for having me today. It’s a real pleasure and an honour to be invited, and a joy to get to talk to a room full of such wonderful and talented writers, some of whose work I had the great pleasure of reading.

I want to start by saying congratulations for having been selected as part of this year’s cohort. It’s an enormous achievement and testament to the fact that each of you in this room is a talented and capable and serious writer. I hope you’re letting the weight of that achievement sink in, that you feel buoyant and proud of what you’ve accomplished.

When Bobby invited me to do this, the brief was to talk a little about my writing life before I got published, a little about my writing life now, and any words of encouragement I can offer to you as you get started on the programme.

I’m hoping that as I’m meeting you today, you’re in a state of celebration of what you’ve accomplished and confidence about what you’ll go on to accomplish, but I know also that every writer who embarks on a long project, like a novel or collection of stories, as I know many of you will do throughout this programme, will inevitably have to weather moments of feeling doubtful and lost and frustrated, and as such, I thought today I could speak to my experience of those moments, and what I’ve learned about weathering them.

To say a little of my writing life before and after I got published, my novel, Evenings and Weekends, came out last year when I was thirty-two, around twelve years after I first started trying to be a working writer. Over the course of that twelve years, I worked full-time in various day jobs, and sometimes night jobs, at first in retail, then call centres, then office work, while writing and performing spoken word pieces at various venues in Dublin, then London. The single biggest challenge of my writing life before I got published was how to preserve enough time and energy throughout my working week so there would be enough left over for writing. I felt as if my whole life were an equation, which, if solved correctly, would allow me to make enough money to eat and pay rent, and time to write, and read, and keep my flat clean, and see my friends, and work out.

I felt as if my whole life were an equation, which, if solved correctly, would allow me to make enough money to eat and pay rent, and time to write, and read, and keep my flat clean, and see my friends, and work out.

Since I got published, this equation has, at times, become easier to solve.

But in other ways, my writing life has not changed very much at all.

As it happens, I am speaking to you in the midst of a moment of doubt and frustration like those described earlier. I’m struggling through a draft of a second book, and on more days than not, I feel sure that it will not work, and I am not good enough. More often than I’d like, I have found myself reading the work of peers who I admire, with a deflated feeling at how poorly my work seems to compare. This isn’t a new feeling, although I had thought that becoming published would signal an end to this self-doubt, that it would prove to myself that I was a good, serious writer and other people thought so too. During the five years it took to write and publish my first novel, I often felt certain then that I could not do it. Even though this has been proven wrong – I could do it, and did – now that the feeling has re-emerged, I still struggle to see it as wholly discredited.

I started wanting to be a writer when I was about seven, and my primary school teacher, Ms McNamara, who had an interest in enriching the cultural lives of the children, took us on various extra-curricular school trips, including, among other things, to see the statue of Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square in Dublin City Centre. I found Oscar Wilde exciting because he was gay and loved, loved enough for our teacher to take us to see his statue, for there to be a statue at all. It was my first time hearing of a gay person being admired. So far, I’d only heard of them being pitiable or laughable or disgusting. Already, at seven, I had started to think of myself as gay, and tentatively, confusedly began to see being a writer as a way – perhaps the only way – to be gay and still loved.

It was also, around that time, that Britney Spears released her album, Baby One More Time. This thrilled me like nothing had thrilled me before, and in aspiration of one day becoming a popstar like Britney, I started writing song lyrics in my copybooks at school, which was my first experience of writing. I was then and still am a shy person, and often come away from encounters feeling that I lacked the verbal capacities to communicate what I meant, and for many years, thought of the day when I might publish a book, in which I could articulate my thoughts robustly, in ways which I could not do in real life. I wanted to be like a combination of Oscar Wilde and Britney Spears, in that I wanted to be glamorous, admired, and able to communicate with depth and power and charisma.

I wanted to write as a way of being loved, loveable, understood and understandable.

Which is to say, the stakes were pretty high.

I think it’s common for a writer to want a great deal from their writing, not least for it to be good, whatever that means to you, and for its goodness to be confirmed by others.

This, of course, can motivate you, as it motivated me, to build a diligent writing routine. It can make you ambitions and tenacious. But, I would say, it hasn’t made my writing better. More often, in my experience, it has created a sense of stifling obligation, making the creative and playful part of my brain so afraid of failing that it becomes immobilised.

When I was quite young, I received a piece of advice on becoming a writer and building a writing routine. The advice was that even when it is not technically your job to write, in the sense of it not being how you make your money, you must treat it like paid work, and show up every day as if you’ll get fired for not doing so. This was helpful advice in that it encouraged me to be serious about my writing routine, but it was obstructive, too, in that it is, in fact, incredibly difficult to write playfully and freely, if the proverbial boss is standing over your shoulder and threatening to terminate your contract if you don’t meet your targets. Having a good writing life, to me, involves a subtle balance between being entirely serious and incredibly silly all at the one time. It is, of course, helpful to commit to your routine, to write a little each day, even when you don’t feel like it, but when it feels too much like toil, or obligation, or when you do it simply to avoid feelings of guilt or shame, those are the occasions on which you start to feel blocked and procrastinate.

Having a good writing life, to me, involves a subtle balance between being entirely serious and incredibly silly all at the one time.

One technique I have found for counter-acting this, is when I sit down to write, I tell myself, gently, playfully, that none of it matters. It does not matter what I write today, whether it’s 2,000 words or 10 words, whether those words encapsulate everything I want to say, or whether they are entirely unusable words which I will never revisit. It can help, sometimes, to set a very low target, like write 100 words, or for 10, 20, 30 minutes, and to have no expectations for the quality of the writing. Setting a low target and no expectations, I find, can be a way of tricking your mind into surpassing that target and exceeding expectations. If there is so much at stake by not doing it, or by doing it and doing it poorly, my inner writer becomes so afraid of failing, that it is not able to try at all, but if none of it matters, then it is free to relax, get loose, suggest its weirdest ideas.

If you have a bad writing day, I would recommend, too, forgiving yourself for it as soon as possible. When you’re working on a long-form project, inevitably there will be periods of time which feel like failure, but this, too, is an inherent part of any artistic process: any book you have ever admired will have gone through long and necessary periods during which it seemed certain that this book would never reach fruition let alone publication. Your job in those moments is to gently probe into what you like or don’t like about your project, and then, to be very kind to yourself. In my experience, scolding yourself for flaws in your writing, perceived inadequacies compared to your peers, or for having not reached certain milestones, is not going to help you reach those milestones any faster.

Writing for pleasure, play, stimulation, and intrigue, is a way of being resilient to the pendulum swing of external approval and rejection.

The most important thing I’ve learned about writing and being a writer, is I write best when I’m having fun. Inevitably, a writing life involves some rejection, and the reassurance of external validation is often fleeting and temporary. Writing for pleasure, play, stimulation, and intrigue, is a way of being resilient to the pendulum swing of external approval and rejection. Writing in a way which prioritises the quality, richness, and depth of your experience as you do so, which is concerned only with the process, never an end goal, is, I think, a more reliable route towards reaching that end goal. It is helpful, I think, to try to cultivate a sense of self-worth that isn’t contingent on whether or not you’ve had a good writing day, let alone whether other people or organisations say your work is good. It is useful, I think, to remind yourself your value cannot be measured discreetly by any one external success, nor by the quality of any one day’s writing.

Part of the brilliance of the London Writer’s Awards is that you’ll receive invaluable feedback from those in your cohort which will help you to think about those small and incremental edits, in novel and stimulating ways. In general, the insight and feedback and most importantly, comradeship of your peers, is one of the most valuable components when gathering the pieces for a life in writing.

The final thing I’d say is about editing. One way to relieve yourself of the pressure to write something you’re proud of, and to write it right now, is to trust that it is in the slow work of small and incremental edits that the manuscript in front of you will become the one you envision. In my experience, coming to the end of a first draft involves a fleeting moment of triumph and pride, followed by a deep despondency at how far your draft seems from the finished book you had imagined. I think it’s worth having almost shockingly low standards for that first draft, accepting that you will, inevitably, write sentences and even whole chapters that on revisiting will seem truly horrible, but trust, also, that this is normal and absolutely necessary: raise the bar slowly with each small tweak you make to your draft, and you’ll find yourself getting closer to what you had hoped for. Part of the brilliance of the London Writer’s Awards is that you’ll receive invaluable feedback from those in your cohort which will help you to think about those small and incremental edits, in novel and stimulating ways. In general, the insight and feedback and most importantly, comradeship of your peers, is one of the most valuable components when gathering the pieces for a life in writing. This, I hope, will be an exciting, and challenging, and rewarding journey for all of you, and I wish you great luck.”

About Oisín McKenna

Oisín McKenna grew up in Drogheda, Ireland, and lives in London. His novel Evenings and Weekends, described by both Dazed and The Evening Standard as ‘the book of the summer’, was published in 2024 by 4th Estate (UK) and Mariner Books (US). He was awarded the Next Generation Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland to write Evenings and Weekends and it was developed with further support from Arts Council England. In 2022, he was awarded a London Writers Award, and in 2017, he was named in the Irish Times as one of the best spoken word artists in the country. He has written and performed four theatre shows, including ADMIN, an award-winning production at Dublin Fringe 2019, and his writing has appeared in GQ, the Evening Standard, the Irish Times, Banshee, and more.