S. Kirk Walsh is a novelist, an editor, and a teacher based in Austin, Texas. Her debut novel,The Elephant of Belfast, inspired by true events that took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during World War II, was published by Counterpoint Press in April 2021. Within weeks of publication, the novel became a national bestseller and generated praise from The New Yorker, The Christian Science Monitor, and others as well as being selected for several top reading lists. It was published as The Zookeeper of Belfast by Hodder/Hachette (the UK, the Commonwealth, and Ireland). The novel has been translated for foreign editions in Norway, Iran, and Romania. Walsh is now working on a second novel inspired by events that took place in Detroit during the 1940s.
Over the years, her fiction, essays, and book reviews have been published in the New York Times Book Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Story Quarterly, Guernica, Longreads, Virginia Quarterly Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She has been a resident at San Ysidro, Ucross, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Each September, she leads a nine-month workshop for fiction writers working on novels and story collections. Walsh is also a member of the core faculty of Alma College’s Low Residency MFA program.
Prior to moving to Austin, Walsh worked on a number of editorial staffs of different national magazines, including Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Self, and Entertainment Weekly. She also worked as a marketing writer for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In the city, she attended the creative writing program at New York University, where she studied with E. L. Doctorow, Peter Carey, and Mona Simpson. For a decade, Walsh served as a screener for MFA program at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.
Walsh offers a range of editing services for nonfiction and fiction projects—from ghostwriting to editorial letters. Her clients have been published with HarperCollins, Ecco, University of Texas Press, LSU Press, among others. She is the founder of Austin Bat Cave, a writing & tutoring center for kids. American Short Fiction awarded her an honor of extraordinary service in the literary community in 2018.
Author Photo: Erich Schlegel.