About Turas Press

Welcome to Turas Press, an independent, Dublin-based publisher dedicated to bringing contemporary poetry and literary fiction to Irish and international readers.

In Irish and Scottish Gaelic, “turas” means “journey.” Turas Press was founded in May 2017 to support writers of poetry and fiction in launching their work into the world, and to make innovative writing accessible to readers who are passionate about literature.  

Here at Turas Press, we are delighted to engage with our readers and writers by bringing our contemporary poetry and literary fiction to you in 2022 and beyond.  If you are a writer who is interested in submitting work to Turas Press, we have two submissions windows: in spring and in autumn. Our September submissions window is now open until the end of the month.  Before you submit, please check our submission guidelines.

All Turas Press books are available from our online bookstore As always, if you are close to one of the many super independent bookshops around the country, you can get Turas Press books from them. If you are looking for a book which they don’t have in stock, they can order it for you. And if there is no indie bookstore nearby, you can make your purchase from this website.  

To request review copies of any of our books,  email us here.We look forward to connecting with you, as a reader, a writer or both!

Forthcoming Event – Joint Launch

In a few weeks, Turas Press will host a long-awaited event:  the joint launch of Liz McSkeane‘s short story collection, What to Put in a Suitcase; and the haunting collection of poetry from Róisín Tierney, Tiger Moth, which was first launched in London on April 5th. Its Dublin release will be celebrated along with Suitcase, on October 5th in the Irish Writers Centre.

Liz McSkeane,  founder and Director of Turas Press, is also a poet and writer of fiction. She has published four collections of poetry and one novel. Liz won the Sunday Tribune/Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award in 1999 for her poetry and in 2016, her début novel, Canticle,  based on the life of the Spanish mystic poet John of the Cross, was a joint winner in the Irish Writers’ Centre/Greenbean Novel Fair. In 2020, one of her poems was long-listed in the UK National Poetry Competition.

What to Put in a Suitcase  contains sixteen stories which have already attracted significant praise: 

 The world of  What to Put in a Suitcase is a very uncertain place, full of uncomfortable questions. These are stories written in spare, pared-back language, with images that startle, packed with interior monologues that are rich with insight and observation and reflect the challenges of modern life: immigration, the pandemic, violence against women, society’s many inequalities.            Catherine Dunne

In the hands of Liz McSkeane, the everyday ‒ a café terrace, a deserted corridor, an oriental rug, an airport lounge ‒ can be abruptly transformed into a site of conflict and menace. Always meticulous in her choice of language, these stories show her skill in evoking our primal emotions.     David Butler

This is a brilliant, incisive collection of contemporary short stories, startling and unsettling in their profound reflections on the complexities of modern life.               Lisa Harding

Readers who would like to get a taster of the collection can read  A Hot Coffee which appeared in The Irish Times Online on Christmas Day 2021; and another story, Lebensraum, which was published in Books Ireland Magazine in March. 

Róisín Tierney who was born in Dublin, has lived in Ireland, Spain and is now based in London. She has worked in many areas, including as a theatrical make-up artist and a museum administrator. Róisín’s poetry has won prizes in many national competitions including the Strokestown, the Brendan Kennelly Award, the Bridport and the Winchester Poetry Prizes. Her pamphlet Dream Endings (Rack Press 2011) won the Michael Marks Award. Her début collection,The Spanish-Italian Border, was published by Arc in 2014. A second pamphlet, Five Poems  (Clutag Press 2016) followed, and a third, Mock-Orange (Rack Press 2019). She has been a Hawthornden Fellow. 

Tiger Moth has been widely praised and very favourably reviewed:

These unsettling, dark lyrics have a wonderful verbal energy; a mythic imagination. Snowberries have a ‘pale gleam’, a ‘halo’, a texture like ‘a mortician gently filling a bruise.’ Insects and birds come as harbingers, as though from another world, and are both read as symbols and also dexterous in their evasion of the speaker’s quest for applied meaning

. Through a careful balancing, Tierney manages to chart the mind’s search for significance with poems seeking similarities between the natural world and the traumas of human life.    Seán Hewitt in The Irish Times

There are poems in Tiger Moth that attend to the natural world with a close, exacting sensibility; others bring a fine, lyric vitality to narratives of childhood and elegies for a sister – a looking back that is clear-eyed, loving, unsentimental, and redemptive.    Greta Stoddart

Here below is one of the magical poems from Tiger Moth.

More News!

This year, Turas Press will be represented at Culture Night! This ‘national moment, celebrating culture, creativity and the arts,’ funded by the Arts Council and local authorities throughout Ireland, takes place on September 23rd. The Instituto Cervantes in Dublin has invited Anamaría Crowe Serrano and Liz McSkeane to participate in a panel with writers who will read from and discuss their work. Anamaría will read from In The Dark, her stunning novel set during the darkest days of the Spanish Civil War. Liz will read from Canticle, her historical detective fiction novel based on the life of one of Spain’s greatest poets, St John of the Cross.

To be continued!