Meet the Mentors of The Binding: PenPals Edition 2026!
At the heart of The Binding is a simple belief: no creator should feel isolated. The Binding’s online programme brings together writers, poets, illustrators and other creatives from different countries, backgrounds and stages of their creative journeys. Our aim is to create a space where people can meet, exchange ideas, learn from one another and build connections that can continue long after the festival.
This year, we are delighted to welcome a wonderful group of 5 mentors who will guide our 20 participants through the online programme of The Binding 2026.
Alongside their professional experience, each of them brings their own creative journey and perspective.
We asked our mentors to tell us a little about themselves: what brought them to The Binding, how their own creative journeys began, and what keeps them creating and connecting with others.
Meet our 2026 mentors below, read their bios, and discover some of the personal stories and motivations behind their work.
Catherine Dunne
Catherine Dunne is the author of twelve novels, several essays and one work of non-fiction. An Unconsidered People, published by New Island, documents the lived experience of some half a million Irish immigrants to Britain in the dismal years of the 1950s.
Catherine’s novels have been shortlisted for a number of prizes, including Listowel Writers’ Week, Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the International Strega Prize.
Her latest novel, A Good Enough Mother, won the European Rapallo Prize for fiction in November 2023, and was published in English by Betimes Books in June 2024.
Her work has been translated into several languages. She was the recipient of the 2018 Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature and is a member of Aosdána.
Catherine shares:
“I was a voracious reader as a child. Stories were central to my life. I believed that if you were a reader, you naturally wrote your own stories, too. It took several years before I realised that this wasn’t the case – but it was already too late. I was hooked. And I’ve always believed that writers don’t really choose their own stories: stories choose us!
I love the idea of initiatives such as The Binding that bring together creatives from all over the world. Writers, illustrators and musicians often work alone.
Opportunities to meet each other and share experiences are all very valuable because they can lead to future collaborations, friendships and even inspiration!
Congratulations to The Binding for making this happen, and in the depths of winter, too. Lovely to have such a light in the darkness.”
Lia Mills
Lia Mills writes novels, short fiction, literary essays and memoir. Her first novel, Another Alice, was nominated for the Irish Times Irish Fiction Prize. Nothing Simple was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year at the inaugural Irish Book Awards. Her memoir of an experience of oral cancer, In Your Face, was named as a favourite book of 2007 by several commentators. Her most recent novel, Fallen, was the Dublin/Belfast Two Cities One Book festival selection for 2016. In the same year she was writer-in-residence at Farmleigh House and Arts Council Fellow at University College Dublin and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Laws from the University of Dublin, Trinity College.
Her work has appeared in, among others, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, The Dublin Review of Books. Her first play, Katie, was staged in 2016 as part of the Two Cities One Book Festival.
Her work has been published in Holland, Brazil, Italy and India and her voluntary work mainly relates to Human Rights issues and to Freedom of Expression, through her work with Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann. She holds a Ph.D in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick and works on the National Mentoring Programme.
Rosaleen Lynch
Rosaleen Lynch is an Irish community worker, teacher and writer living in London, researching the power of stories to promote social change. She writes mainly flash fiction with over nearly 200 pieces published online and in print, in journals like New Flash Fiction Review, Fractured Lit, Craft, SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, EllipsisZine, Mslexia, Litro and Fish and appears in charity anthologies such as Word for Freedom, celebrating 100 years of women’s suffrage and FUEL, a fuel poverty charity anthology of prize winning stories.
Rosaleen’s stories have been shortlisted by the Edinburgh, Quiet Man Dave, Bath and Bridport Prizes, won the HISSAC Prize, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize & Lunate’s International Women’s Day Microfiction Prize, were nominated for Best Microfiction & the Pushcart Prize & selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 2023, Best Women’s Short Fiction, Best Short Fictions & Best of the Net.
Tatyana Feeney
Tatyana Feeney is a children’s book author-illustrator. She grew up in North Carolina, where she received her BA in Art History. She also holds a BA in Children’s Illustration from Glyndwr University and an MA in Illustration from the University of Hertfordshire. She now makes her home in Trim, Co Meath.
She is the author-illustrator of over fifteen titles including, Small Bunny’s Blue Blanket, Little Owl’s Orange Scarf, and Small Elephant’s Bathtime (Oxford University Press) and Socks for Mr. Wolf and Eva and the Perfect Rain (The O’Brien Press). She has also illustrated a number of books for other authors, including many in the My Irish Books catalogue.
Tatyana prefers to work using printmaking and other handmade media. Most of her illustrations are created as monoprints with added textures through collage and coloured pencil. She recently participated in the Intentionally Offline project which was a collection of work created without using any digital content.
Tatyana shares:
“I think that going to the library from the time I was very young, and having stories read to me by my parents is really what started my creative journey.
I spent a lot of time reading and looking at picture books growing up. Yes! I loved picture books even as a teenager, and my best friend and I were often gifting each other picture books through our young adult years.
I studied art in college and then I worked for a short time in a pre-school. I think that having an art background and a love of picturebooks and then sharing these with young kids all combined to make me want to be involved in the world of children's stories.”
Ganna Gnedkova
Ganna Gnedkova is a Ukrainian author, literary critic, and translator from English and German into Ukrainian (and vice versa). She is a member of “translit e.V.,” an organization for translators of Ukrainian literature into German. She has translated over 40 books (fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and children’s literature).
Ganna holds a master’s degree in philology from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. She has lived in Austria since 2015, where she earned a master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Vienna. In early 2023, Passagen-Verlag published a collection of essays she edited: “Ukraine mon amour: Voices of a Free Nation.”
Ganna Gnedkova is the founder and chair of the Media Center of the Ukrainian Community in Vienna (muc.wien) as well as co-founder and moderator of the Ukrainian literary club LiterAktiv in Vienna. She is a member of PEN Ukraine.
Ganna shares:
“Knowing the work of Halyna Budilova, I was grateful to receive an invitation to become a mentor for The Binding. I hope the programme will do exactly what its name suggests: bind us together and give us a space to exchange ideas, experiences, and perspectives.
Living as an expat in Austria and teaching German to people from many different countries, I have learned that we can have very different backgrounds, upbringings, and beliefs and still find a great deal in common.
Our differences do not have to divide us; they can make us interesting to one another.
Literature brings the experiences of different people closer to us and, at its best, teaches us something similar: compassion and empathy.
I think programmes like The Binding can create a space where we learn from one another, and where differences become a source of curiosity and inspiration rather than distance.”
Photographs of Catherine and Lia by Simon Robinson