In late 2021, Keegan published a novella, Small Things Like These, set in Ireland in the mid-1980s. [6] [9] It was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. [10]

They don’t know the half of it, don’t know the disguises I made for them, how I took 20 years off their hard-earned faces, washed the honey-blond rinses out of their hair, how I put them in another country and changed their names.” Keegan is an extraordinary writer and her first collection, Antarctica, is an early promise of the great things to come. With any collection one should expect some highs and lows amongst the stories and this is no different though the highs certainly outnumber the lows. Her writing is so crisp it’s like taking a bite out of a head of lettuce and these stories are so fine tuned and succinct it is nearly miraculous. It is no surprise books like the novella Foster (a favorite of mine) are so concise with maximum emotional resonance when she writes short, short stories like these so eloquently. Antarctica is a gem and I can’t get enough Claire Keegan. See Faber authors in conversation and hear readings from their work at Faber Members events, literary festivals and at book shops across the UK. In a Quare Name for a Boy a woman, who is obviously pregnant, recalls her relationship with her lover. While reading, it is easy to get lost in these reminiscences, but now that I was familiar with Keegan's little surprises, I kept wondering where this was going!

In a transfixing appearance on American TV twelve years ago, Keegan invoked caution and reluctance when speaking about her writing and said she was suspicious of any idea that presented itself to her with excitement. Hers was unlike any other interview with an author I’ve seen. Motionless, concentrated and pragmatic, she extended to her creations the sort of courteous interest one might take in a young cousin. Nothing about self-expression. Yet an absolute correspondence between her presence and her fiction. Keegan does something rare in creating archives of unhappiness, showing the way one sorrow may reverberate with another, how pressure can activate the pain of an old bruise.’ Small Things Like These has been described as historical fiction, yet the author disagrees with it being a novel about the Magdalene laundries ( Guardian interview, October 21), saying, ‘I think it’s a story about a man who was loved in his youth and can’t resist offering the same type of love to somebody else’. Discuss how Claire Keegan has allowed historical fiction and a deeper character study to intersect.

Or take another story - 'The Singing Cashier' - the elder girl, has lustful relations with the postman and sends her younger sibling out of the house on made-up errands, while she does the 'dirty'. Later in the story, news of a serial murder's house - just down the street, and the elder one makes a swift decision, knowing she has to protect her sister. It's real-life, a sudden jostling of priorities. Claire Keegan is a novelist and short story writer, whose work has won numerous awards and been translated into 30 languages. Read it is a supernaturally delicious and almost illicit feeling that assails us from her stories, sometimes touching, or chilling where anonymous characters, even possessed by a "savage" behaviour, manage to awaken in us a powerful empathy, to the point that you kind of sympathise with them. Before starting this, I fully expected it to be a one-star-less read than Walk the Blue Fields; how could it be as good? These earlier stories are perhaps less complex than the later ones, but this collection contains two of my now-new favorites. I am in awe of Keegan's satisfying, even cathartic, endings. SMC Sponsored Programs - Celtic Studies - Ireland Fund Artist-in-Residence Program | University of St. Michael's College". stmikes.utoronto.ca. Archived from the original on 29 September 2017 . Retrieved 28 September 2017.

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MADAME FIGARO, finalistes du Grand Prix de l'Héroïne 2021, vendredi 12 février 2021 | Revue de presse • SABINE WESPIESER ÉDITEUR". Claire Keegan's stories are fascinating. A couple left me scratching my head, as I'm nowhere near as deep as I'd like to be, and so sometimes reading inbetween the lines is not my strong suit. However, I found the majority of her short stories about rural Irish families and Southern American men and women to be so original. I'm continuously in awe of people who have brains that are capable of making plausible, interesting fictional tales up. Keegan is absolutely capable of this and it was well-worth a read. As with Antarctica, it is the rich psychological realism of Keegan’s characters which propels these stories beyond simple aesthetic splendour. The first story, ‘The Parting Gift’, is told through eerie, second-person narration which allows simultaneously for emotional intimacy and for cold, detached objectivity on the part of the reader. The story, describing a teenage girl about to leave her family and embrace a new life beyond the uncertainty of emigration, presents the unsettling domesticity of abuse in rural Ireland via an effective slow-burn in which the potentialities of the unnamed girl are undermined utterly by her shrinking emotional horizons. Her Leaving Cert inability ‘to explain that line about the dancer and the dance’ reflects her own situation, caught between a grotesque inseparability of home and horror. The stunning debut story collection from the author of Foster and the Booker Prize shortlised Small Things Like These

The book ends at a point where many other authors would begin their novels’ second act. To what extent is Keegan deliberately asking the reader to create the rest of the story for themselves? What do you think happens to Bill Furlong next? There is a shift in attitude in the new novel towards two of Keegan’s most urgent subjects. A father takes centre stage as a good man and secrecy is shown up as a terrible thing – as a form of pernicious lying. This puts the novel in an interesting relation to Foster, where secrets are regarded more ambivalently – sometimes things should not be said – while one father is seen utterly to fail. Her examination of being an abandoned daughter is at its most intense here: Keegan joins E. Nesbit and Sylvia Plath in clinching on the cry ‘Daddy!’ The Taoiseach had signed an agreement with Thatcher over The North, and the Unionists in Belfast were out marching with drums, protesting over Dublin having any say in their affairs. (p. 13) What was the political atmosphere of the time in Ireland? How did this impact communities such as the one which Bill Furlong lives in? It was December; she felt a certain closing on another year. She needed to do this before she got too old.”Published to great critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, the iridescent stories in Claire Keegan's debut collection, Antarctica, have been acclaimed by The Observer to be "among the finest contemporary stories written recently in English." When Furlong first visits the local laundry to deliver some logs, a girl with roughly cut hair begs him to help and take her ‘as far as the river’. Furlong replies by showing his open, empty hands. What does Furlong mean by this gesture? (p. 41) I will learn fifteen types of wind and know the weight of tomorrow's rain by the rustle in the sycamores.” Many of the stories are about desire, infidelity, regret, often cautionary tales. “Love in the Tall Grass,” is about a love affair, too, and a break-up with an open ending. I liked several, including “Sisters,” “Quare Name for a Boy,” with its writer returning to her Irish rural roots: