Antarctica: ‘A genuine once-in-a-generation writer.’ THE TIMES

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Inside the laundry, one of the nuns suggests Furlong must be disappointed as he has five girls and ‘ no boy to carry on the name’. Furlong replies by saying: ‘ What have I against girls?’ […] ‘My own mother was a girl, once. And I dare say the same must be true of you and half of all belonging to us.’ Why is the feminist attitude expressed by Furlong unique for the time and community he lives in? (p. 66 - 67) While he took charge of dinner, she sat on the couch with the cat on her lap and watched a documentary on Antarctica, miles of snow, penguins shuffling against subzero winds, Captain Cook sailing down to find the lost continent. He came out with a tea towel draped across his shoulder and handed her a glass of chilled wine. 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." Claire Keegan (born 1968) is an Irish writer known for her short stories, which have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, and The Paris Review. [1] [2] Biography [ edit ]

It’s enough to allow her to contemplate giving up the creative writing teaching she has done for years. She currently has a fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge, as part of an exchange with Trinity, Dublin. “I really did spend a good deal of the last decade going deeply into how creative writing could be taught, and seeing what I could and couldn’t do there,” she says. “And I feel I’ve come out the other end of that now. I’ll probably just stay at my desk for the next decade.” If you decide to read it, I'll advise you to do it slowly, tasting and digesting word by word in the search of all those "pictures' Keegan paints with words.She doesn't vehicle any direct sociocultural messages or try to convert or moralize the reader but focuses instead on projecting a vision ( The Art of Fiction is the Art of Making Pictures: if you are not making pictures with your words, then you are using cerebral observations. The reader can’t see any of those.) and let the reader live it with her talent for finding the right word for the right moment and her dexterity with language in giving great importance to common details that other writers would dismiss simply because they happen every day. This makes Keegan's writing a breath of fresh air in the literary world. Keegan has won the inaugural William Trevor Prize, [11] the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, [11] the Olive Cook Award and the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. [11] Other awards include the Hugh Leonard Bursary, the Macaulay Fellowship, [11] the Martin Healy Prize, the Kilkenny Prize, and the Tom Gallon Award. She was also a 2002 Wingate Scholar and a two-time recipient of the Francis MacManus Award. She was a visiting professor at Villanova University in 2008. Keegan was the Ireland Fund Artist-in-Residence in the Celtic Studies Department of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto in March 2009. [12] In 2019, she was appointed as Writing Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. [13] Pembroke College Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin selected Keegan as the 2021 Briena Staunton Visiting Fellow. [14] You Can’t Be Too Careful,” is a small story about a man taken out on a dawn fishing boat by a convict on the run. Suspenseful. The characters in these unsettling tales are all damaged in some way. Broken marriages, grief, loneliness - these are some of the subjects that have emerged to upend their lives. Most of the stories are set in Ireland, and to be honest the few that take place elsewhere are a bit jarring. Keegan's writing feels much more natural and assured in her native land. From the elements of this simple existence in an inconsequential town, Keegan has carved out a profoundly moving and universal story. There’s nothing preachy here, just the strange joy and anxiety of firmly resisting cruelty.’

Ireland Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award Ceremony 2021". Ambassade de France en Irlande - French Embassy in Ireland.It was December; she felt a certain closing on another year. She needed to do this before she got too old.”

DENSE….with strange endings — unsettling and or intriguing endings - brilliant prose — and (for me) —AT LEAST not as excruciating devastating as the title story. Something I liked in all the stories is how Keegan connects us with the environment. The natural world is always present, 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. Instead, over Greek salad and grilled trout, the conversation somehow turned to the subject of hell.

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Keegan's first collection of short stories, Antarctica (1999), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the William Trevor Prize. [4] [5] Her second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, was published in 2007. Keegan's 'long, short story' [6] Foster won the 2009 Davy Byrnes Short Story Award. [7] Foster appeared in the 15 February 2010 issue of New Yorker; it was later published by Faber and Faber in longer form. Foster is now included as a text for the Irish Leaving Certificate. [8] It was adapted for film by writer/director Colm Bairéad in 2021 and released as An Cailín Ciúin ( The Quiet Girl) in May 2022.

I had read about two years ago both her novella ‘Small Things Like These’ and her short story (a rather long one) ‘The Forester’s Daughter’ and gave them both 5 stars too. I had her debut collection of short stories on my bookshelves for years....and realizing I had not read it read it over the last two days. She has been compared to William Trevor who was (and I think still is) a fave author of mine. And I do remember his stories are not a romp in the park...they tend to be on the melancholy/sad/depressing type (at least to me). But boy can he write! Some things you just have no control over,” he said, scratching his head. “She said I wouldn’t last a year without her. Boy, was she wrong.” He looked at her then, and smiled, a strange smile of victory. What Keegan invents is most compelling because no one could imagine it better.”—Kevin Grandfield, American Book ReviewI will learn fifteen types of wind and know the weight of tomorrow's rain by the rustle in the sycamores.” 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. This 1999 short story collection was Claire Keegan’s first book, and you can certainly sense the writer she has since become in Small Things Like These and Foster - the clarity of language and the small, often rural or small town interactions between people, the simmering under the surface, little-to-be-saidness of their relationships. She wasn’t, of course, quite there yet with her first book. Some of the stories felt too carefully composed for me, a writer’s exercise, the language or plot points noticeably selected by the author. A few are set in the southern US, and I felt Keegan’s pleasure in writing American English shone through a little too strongly and unnaturally (sometimes not quite right either - in ‘Burns,’ surely that should be a stove or a range, not a hob). A strong story was 'Passport Soup'. It's very short but Keegan manages to fit in a whole story, plus complicated emotions into that tiny writerly space, and I felt yes - that's exactly the kind of cruel retaliation a woman might wreak on her husband because of the loss of a child. It felt entirely possible and it's all told from the husband's point of view, so we understand how much men suffer in these situations. If the mother superior’s story is left untold, so is that of the girl found shivering in the coal shed. “I’m not saying she isn’t a person,’ says Keegan. “I’m saying that the book isn’t her story. And maybe that’s deeply appropriate, because so many women and girls were peripheral figures. They weren’t central. Not even to their own families, not even to their own parents.”