Rachel Gough is a writer and academic from Cork.

Her work includes short fiction broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in The Waxed Lemon, Outpost, Bealtaine, The National Flash Fiction Anthology, and Best Small Fictions and The Medusa. Her poetry has been published in Quarryman, One Good Day, Oscail and Abridged Magazine. In 2026, she won the Michael McLaverty Short Story Award. She is currently working on her first short story collection.

She holds a PhD in Film and Screen Media from University College Cork. She is a postdoctoral researcher based in the CPPU group at the Sustainability Institute where she is working on the EPA-funded CLIMATUDE project. This project is focusing on developing an understanding of Irish people’s attitudes, beliefs and values related to climate change. She also lectures in the Department of Film and Screen Media.

In 2021, her short story ‘December 25th 2022’ was shortlisted at the Wild Atlantic Words Festival. In 2023, she received the Editor’s Choice Award from the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, and she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the same year. In 2025, she was awarded first place in the flash fiction category at the Write by the Sea Literary Festival. In 2026, she was awarded the Irish Writers Centre Notre Dame Kylemore Residency. Also in 2026, she won the Michael McLaverty Short Story Award and received a mentorship with Patrick Holloway at the Munster Literature Centre.

Her work explores the surreal, the supernatural, and the complexities of memory. Her writing often examines rural ecologies and communities, exploring the threads that bind them together and the forces that drive them apart.

(Back Row, L - R) Neil Hegarty, Marie Gethins, Emma Warnock (Front Row, L - R) Rachel Gough, Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurath

 © The Linen Hall.

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A scenic outdoor pathway with green grass, mountains in the distance, and a clear blue sky, featuring an overlaid poem titled 'Good Bones' by Maggie Smith.
A white sheet of paper with a poem printed on it is held up outdoors against a background of a partly cloudy sky with the sun shining and some bare tree branches. The poem is titled 'To be of use' by Marge Percy.
Poem titled "The One" by Patrick Kavanagh displayed over a coastal landscape with blue sky, ocean, and shoreline.
A scenic landscape with a sunset sky, trees, and grass, overlaid with a white semi-transparent text box containing a poem titled 'In My Natural Habitat' by Hedgie Choi.
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