CANR
WORK TITLE: SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE
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NATIONALITY: Irish
LAST VOLUME: CA 291
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1968, in County Wicklow, Ireland.
EDUCATION:Attended Loyola University; University of Wales, M.A.; Trinity College, M.Phil.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and creative writing teacher. Writer-in- residence at University College, Dublin, Ireland, and Dublin City University; Heimbold Visiting Professor of Irish Studies, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, 2008; Ireland Fund Artist-in-Residence in the Celtic Studies Department of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, 2009; Writing Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, 2019; Briena Staunton Visiting Fellow, Pembroke College Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin, 2021.
MEMBER:Aosdána.
AWARDS:Hugh Leonard Bursary, Macauley fellow, Martin Healy Prize, Kilkenny Prize, Tom Gallon Award, William Trevor Prize, Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Olive Cook Award, and Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, 2009, all for short story “Foster;” Francophonie Ambassadors’ Literary Award, 2021.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
An award-winning author of short stories, Claire Keegan was born in rural County Wicklow, Ireland, where she grew up on a farm as the youngest member of a large family. She studied English and political science at Loyola University in New Orleans, then returned to Ireland. She began writing in 1994 when, during a spell of unemployment, she submitted her first story to a televised writing contest and saw her creation attain the list of top ten out of 10,000 entries. Encouraged, she enrolled at the University of Cardiff, Wales, where she earned a master’s degree in creative writing while developing her narrative voice and a talent for storytelling. After another success in 1996, taking fourth place in the Francis McManus Short Story Competition, she encountered literary scout David Marcus, who eventually brought her work to the attention of publisher Faber and Faber. This resulted in the publication of Antarctica, her first collection, in 1999. Of her taste for the short story form, Keegan told interviewer Declan Meade on the Stinging Fly Web site, “I find the short story form deeply attractive. I think it’s just slightly beneath poetry for me. … The short story is like a poem in that there is nothing lost. Everything is savoured. There is a strictness about it which I really admire and it takes your breath away if it’s good.”
The fifteen stories of Antarctica are set in Ireland and the southern United States. The collection describes the coming of age of a new generation in Ireland. The often- rebellious female characters are young, eager for experience, and set in family situations that offer very little comfort or encouragement. On its cover, the book offered an enthusiastic recommendation from William Trevor, a legendary Irish storyteller whose endorsement for a debut book by a young and relatively unknown author surprised the literary world. Other reviewers, on both sides of the Atlantic, offered similarly enthusiastic praise. A Publishers Weekly contributor offered that “while Keegan’s imagery occasionally bears the clear brand of the M.F.A. program, these moments are few and are outweighed by the restraint with which she deploys such imagery, and by her stern refusal to fall back on anything that might resemble a happy ending.” Max Brzezinski, writing in the Antioch Review, noted that “Keegan writes confidently and with great insight and has produced a livewire collection that is alternatingly terrifying and endearing.”
About her writing method, Keegan revealed to interviewer Meade: “It doesn’t start with a concept or an idea: I’m going to write about so and so because that’s interesting. That never occurs to me. When I begin a story I have no idea how it will end. … The guilt is what makes you sit down. You know that you have the capacity to write and you have something in your mind that will not go away. … Then you can go back and you can fix it. I love that part too. I love being brutal with the first draft, paring it down and seeing the skeleton of the prose.”
Walk the Blue Fields
The author’s second story collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published in 2007. This collection of seven stories is taken from the author’s own vivid experiences in rural Ireland, where tragedy is a familiar outcome and human relationships have the quality of timelessness. In her storytelling, the author recalls Irish folktales and myths, while citing the Russian nineteenth-century author Anton Chekhov and setting her characters firmly in the complex, often-harsh circumstances of the twentieth century. Reviewer Anne Enright in the Guardian commented: “This is a rural world of silent men and wild women who, for the most part, make bad marriages and vivid, uncomprehending children. It is most clearly seen through the eyes of the young because ‘to be an adult was, for the greatest part, to be in darkness’. … Keegan makes stories as you might knock a window into the lives of the people she describes; shedding light, conferring power, inviting escape.”
In an admiring review on the Web site Bookslut, Cynthia Reeser concluded, “Keegan is promising as a storyteller, particularly when she leaves herself out of the equation. In her case, emotionally distant and detached narrators work in her favor; sometimes less is more. Her sense of pacing, narrative flow and characterization propel the sharp edges of her Ireland into solid, memorable storytelling.” Publishers Weekly gave the author further encouragement: “Keegan’s poetic prose, spot-on dialogue and well paced plot twists keep the pages turning through sadness, grief, rage and compromise.”
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Small Things Like These
In her 2021 novella, Small Things Like These, Keegan offers a story of hope and quotidian heroism set in a small Irish town in the weeks leading up to Christmas. It is 1985, and Bill Furlong is a local coal merchant dealing with his busiest season. He is delivering coal to a local convent early one morning when he makes a discovery that challenges him to deal not only with his own past but also the silence surrounding the activities of the convent. A young girl pleads with Bill to help her leave the convent. He has witnessed troubling things about the convent and has kept quiet, as has the rest of the town. Now this teenage girl forces Bill, a strong family man, to deal with his own childhood experiences, born to a 16-year-old unwed mother, who might have suffered the same imprisonment. Facing his own past, he finally moves to action in the present. The novel implicitly deals with the infamous Magdalene laundries of Ireland, institutions run by the Roman Catholic orders to house so-called “fallen women” who had sex outside of marriage. In fact, such places incarcerated more than 10,000 girls and women between 1922 and 1996. The inmates carried out hard labor for months and even years.
Online Guardian reviewer Ben East felt it was a “brave move” for this novella to deal with the Magdalene laundries. East further noted that Keegan’s writing possesses “rare power and texture… [in this] intensely moral book, full of hope and love.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer similarly termed Small Things Like These “gorgeously textured.” The reviewer added: “It all leads to a bittersweet culmination, a sort of anti-Christmas Carol … . Readers will be touched.” Likewise, a Kirkus Reviews critic called this a “compact and gripping novel,” as well as a “stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America, January 7, 2002, “Forbidden Fruits,” p. 24.
Antioch Review, March 22, 2002, Max Brzezinski, review of Antarctica, p. 340.
Booklist, June 1, 2001, Danise Hoover, review of Antarctica, p. 1845.
Irish Literary Supplement, September 22, 2002, “A Winning First Effort,” p. 26.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2021, review of Small Things Like These.
Library Journal, June 1, 2001, Heather McCormack, review of Antarctica, p. 220.
London Review of Books, January 24, 2008, “Red Flowers at a Wedding?,” p. 21.
Los Angeles Times, July 8, 2001, review of Antarctica, p. 10; December 2, 2001, review of Antarctica, p. 3.
Newsweek, August 27, 2001, review of Antarctica, p. 58.
New York Times Book Review, July 29, 2001, “All the Lonely People: A Debut Story Collection Explores the Couplings and Uncouplings of Its Characters,” p. 10; September 7, 2008, “Watchers and Tellers,” p. 20.
Publishers Weekly, June 18, 2001, review of Antarctica, p. 54; May 26, 2008, review of Walk the Blue Fields, p. 38; August 23, 2020, review of Small Things Like These, p. 41.
ONLINE
Bookseller, https://www.thebookseller.com/ (October 26, 2020), Ruth Comerford, “Faber Lands Claire Keegan’s ‘delicately wrought’ Novel.”
Bookslut, http:// www.bookslut.com/ (May 1, 2008), Cynthia Reeser, review of Walk the Blue Fields.
Curtis Brown, https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/ (October 14, 2021), author profile.
Faber, https://www.faber.co.uk/ (October 26, 2020), “Faber Announces Masterful New Novel by Claire Keegan, One of Ireland’s Great Writers.”
Fantastic Fiction, http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/ (August 12, 2009), author biography.
Guardian, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/ (August 25, 2007), Anne Enright, “Dancing in the Dark”; (October 17, 2021), Ben East, review of Small Things Like These.
Independent, http:// www.independent.co.uk/ (May 4, 2008), Brandon Robshaw, review of Walk the Blue Fields.
Stinging Fly, http:// www.stingingfly.org/ (August 12, 2009), Declan Meade, “Claire Keegan.”
Winter with the Writers, http://tars.rollins.edu/winterwiththewriters/ (August 12, 2009), author biography.*
Claire Keegan
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Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan by Cartier-Bresson.jpg
Born 1968 (age 52–53)
County Wicklow, Ireland
Occupation Short story writer
Notable works Antarctica
Walk the Blue Fields
"Foster"
Small Things like These
Notable awards Rooney Prize for Irish Literature
2000
Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award
2009
Website
ckfictionclinic.com
Claire Keegan (born 1968) is an Irish writer known for her award-winning short stories. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, and The Paris Review; and translated into 20 languages.[1][2]
Contents
1 Biography
2 List of works
3 Awards and honours
4 References
5 External links
Biography
Born in County Wicklow in 1968, she is the youngest of a large Roman Catholic family. Keegan traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana when she was seventeen and studied English and Political Science at Loyola University. She returned to Ireland in 1992 and later lived for a year in Cardiff, Wales, where she undertook an MA in creative writing and taught undergraduates at the University of Wales.
Keegan's first collection of short stories Antarctica (1999) won a slew of awards, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year.[3] Her second collection of much awarded short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, was published in 2007. Keegan's acclaimed 'long, short story' "Foster" won the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009 [4] American writer Richard Ford, who selected "Foster" as winner, wrote of Keegan's “thrilling” instinct for the right words and her “patient attention to life's vast consequence and finality".[5] Foster appeared in the New Yorker and was declared the “Best of the Year” by the 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.[6]
Keegan lives in rural Ireland.
List of works
1999 – Antarctica
2007 – Walk the Blue Fields
2010 – Foster
2021 - Small Things like These
Awards and honours
Keegan has won the inaugural William Trevor Prize,[5] the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature,[5] the Olive Cook Award and the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009.[5] Other awards include The Hugh Leonard Bursary, The Macaulay Fellowship,[5] The Martin Healy Prize, The Kilkenny Prize and The Tom Gallon Award. Twice was Keegan the recipient of the Francis MacManus Award. She was also a Wingate Scholar. 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.[7] In 2019, she was appointed as Writing Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.[8] Pembroke College Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin selected Keegan as the 2021 Briena Staunton Visiting Fellow.[9] The French version of Claire's new novel, Ce genre de petites choses, has been shortlisted for two prestigious awards: the Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award [10] and the Grand Prix de L'Heroine Madame Figaro.[11] In March 2021, Claire and her French translator, Jacqueline Odin, won the Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award.[12]
Claire is a member of Aosdána.[13]
Faber announces masterful new novel by Claire Keegan, one of Ireland’s great writers
Faber | 26 October 2020
Faber announces Small Things Like These, a beautiful and delicately wrought short novel by Claire Keegan. The novel will be published in Autumn 2021. Alex Bowler acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Felicity Blunt at Curtis Brown.
Alex Bowler, Publisher, said:
An exquisite wintery parable, Claire Keegan’s long-awaited return tells the story of a simple act of courage and tenderness, in the face of conformity, fear and judgement. To read it is to be deeply touched by hope and by the sheer storytelling brilliance of one of Ireland’s great writers.
Felicity Blunt, Curtis Brown, said:
Claire is an extraordinary writer, one whose stories bury themselves inside of you, emotionally resonant and sharp-edged with truth. She is a writer for all times. I am delighted that Faber and Alex Bowler have such big plans for her for 2021.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a family man confronts his past and a discovery which leads him to find and renew the fire and freshness in his heart. Told with restraint and grace, it displays Claire Keegan’s phenomenal talent, a writer who has won praise from Hilary Mantel, Anne Enright and Richard Ford.
Claire Keegan grew up on a farm in Wicklow. Her first collection of short stories, Antarctica, was completed in 1998. It announced her as an exceptionally gifted and versatile writer of contemporary fiction, and she was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature. Her second short-story collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to enormous critical acclaim in 2007 and won her the 2008 Edge Hill Prize for Short Stories. Foster, a short novel, was published in 2010 and won the Davy Byrnes Award, judged by Richard Ford. Claire Keegan lives in County Wexford, Ireland.
Claire Keegan was born in County Wicklow, the youngest of a large family. She travelled to New Orleans, Louisiana when she was seventeen, and studied English and Political Science at Loyola University. She returned to Ireland in 1992 and lived for a year in Cardiff, Wales, where she undertook an MA in creative writing and taught undergraduates at the University of Wales.
Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review and Best American Stories. She has won the William Trevor Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Olive Cook Award and the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. Other awards include The Hugh Leonard Bursary, The Macaulay Fellowship, The Martin Healy Prize, The Kilkenny Prize and The Tom Gallon Award. Claire was twice the recipient of the Francis MacManus Award, and she was also a Wingate Scholar. Trinity College Dublin and Pembroke College Cambridge have chosen Keegan as the 2021 Briena Staunton Visiting Fellow.
The American writer Richard Ford, who selected her short story Foster as winner of the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009, wrote in the winning citation of Keegan’s “thrilling” instinct for the right words and her “patient attention to life’s vast consequence and finality".
Keegan is also included in a permanent exhibition at the new Museum of Literature, Ireland, which opened in 2019. The exhibition celebrates great Irish writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.She is internationally renowned as a teacher of creative writing. She lives in Ireland.
Faber lands Claire Keegan's 'delicately wrought' novel
Published October 26, 2020 by Ruth Comerford
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Faber is to publish Claire Keegan's latest novel, Small Things Like These, next autumn.
Publisher Alex Bowler acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Felicity Blunt at Curtis Brown. The novel has already generated considerable international rights interest, with Anna Stein securing a deal with Elizabeth Schmitz and Katie Raissian at Grove for North American rights, and translation rights sold in France (Sabine Wespieser), Holland (Nieuw Amsterdam), Norway (Aschehoug), Germany (Steidl Verlag), Denmark (Gutkind) and Lithuania (Baltos Lankos). Offers for Spanish and Catalan rights have also been received.
Descibed as "delicately wrought" and "beautiful", the synopsis states: "In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a family man, confronts his past and a discovery which leads him to find and renew the fire and freshness in his heart. Told with restraint and grace, it displays Claire Keegan's phenomenal talent, a writer who has won praise from Hilary Mantel, Anne Enright and Richard Ford."
Bowler said: "An exquisite wintery parable, Claire Keegan’s long-awaited return tells the story of a simple act of courage and tenderness, in the face of conformity, fear and judgement. To read it is to be deeply touched by hope and by the sheer storytelling brilliance of one of Ireland’s great writers."
Blunt added: "Claire is an extraordinary writer, one whose stories bury themselves inside of you, emotionally resonant and sharp-edged with truth. She is a writer for all times. I am delighted that Faber and Alex Bowler have such big plans for her for 2021."
Keegan's first collection of short stories, Antarctica, was completed in 1998, and she was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature. Her second short-story collection, Walk the Blue Fields, won her the 2008 Edge Hill Prize for Short Stories. Foster, a short novel, was published in 2010 and won the Davy Byrnes Award, judged by Richard Ford.
Translation enquiries should be sent to claire.nozieres@curtisbrown.co.uk.
QUOTE: "gorgeously textured."
"It all leads to a bittersweet culmination, a sort of anti-Christmas Carol ... . Readers will be touched."
Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan. Grove, $23 (128p) ISBN 978-08021-5874-1
Irish story writer Keegan's gorgeously textured second novella (after Foster) centers on a family man who wants to do the right thing. It's almost Christmas in a small town south of Dublin, Ireland, in 1985. Bighearted coal dealer Bill Furlong makes deliveries at all hours, buys dinner for his men, plays Santa Claus for the local children, and cares for his five daughters along with his wife, Eileen. Meanwhile, rumors circulate about the "training school" at a nearby convent, suggesting it's a front for free labor by young unwed mothers to support a laundry service, but no one wants to rock the boat. When Bill is there on a delivery, a teenage girl begs him to take her with him, and he politely makes excuses. He also notices broken glass topping the walls. Eileen tells him to "stay on the right side ofpeople," but he feels he should do something--not just because he imagines his own daughters imprisoned there, but because he was born to a 16-year-old unwed mother who could have suffered a similar fate. Keegan beautifully conveys Bill's interior life as he returns to the house where he was raised ("Wasn't it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past... despite the upset"). It all leads to a bittersweet culmination, a sort of anti-Christmas Carol, but to Bill it's simply sweet. Readers will be touched. (Nov.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Small Things Like These." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 34, 23 Aug. 2021, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A673950242/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ae38cd77. Accessed 6 Oct. 2021.
QUOTE: "compact and gripping novel," as well as a "stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity."
Keegan, Claire SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE Grove (Fiction None) $22.00 11, 30 ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, "What was it all for? Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?" But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a "training school for girls" and laundry business, disrupts Furlong's sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland's Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross' convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong's emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent's activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Keegan, Claire: SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A675150254/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=de110659. Accessed 6 Oct. 2021.
QUOTE: "brave move"
"rare power and texture... [in this] intensely moral book, full of hope and love."
Ben East
Sun 17 Oct 2021 11.00 EDT
Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan
Faber, £10, pp128
It is a brave move to take on the complex, systematic cruelty of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries in a novella, and Claire Keegan writes with a rare power and texture. A teenage girl begs family man Bill Furlong to remove her from the convent to which he delivers coal. Societal mores means he’s urged to keep quiet about the troubling things he’s beginning to see, but Bill’s own childhood experiences compel him to both confront his past and act in his present. A restrained and intensely moral book, full of hope and love.