Claire Keegan

Claire Keegan studied at Cardiff University, University of Wales and University of St. Michael's College. The recorded working language is English. Works named in the authority record are Foster and Small Things Like These. Distinctions recorded are Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Siegfried Lenz Prize and Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Claire Keegan was born in 1968, and raised on a farm as one of a large family in County Wicklow, Ireland. She travelled to New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, when she was 17 and studied English and political science at Loyola University. She returned to Ireland in 1992, working part-time in a library. She later studied for a master's in creative writing at Cardiff University. She subsequently received an M. Phil at Trinity College Dublin.

Keegan's first collection of short stories, Antarctica (1999), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the William Trevor Prize. Her second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, was published in 2007. Keegan's 'long, short story' "Foster" won the 2009 Davy Byrnes Short Story Award. "Foster" appeared in the 15 February 2010 issue of The New Yorker and was included in The Best American Short Stories 2011. It was later published by Faber and Faber in a longer form. "Foster" is now included as a text for the Irish Leaving Certificate. It was adapted for film by writer/director Colm Bairéad as An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl; 2022), and was nominated in 2023 for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. In late 2021, Keegan published a novella, Small Things Like These, set in Ireland in the mid-1980s. It was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. The film adaptation, starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, and Eileen Walsh, had its world premiere at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival on 15 February 2024. In 2024, Oprah Winfrey selected the novel as the 109th choice in her Book Club. In February 2022 the story So Late in the Day was published in The New Yorker, and was released in a hardback edition in 2023 by Faber.

• 2021 – Small Things Like These

• 1998 – "The Singing Cashier". Published in The Paris Review • 2004 — "Close to the Water’s Edge". Published in Birthday Stories: Selected and Introduced by Haruki Murakami. ISBN 978-1-843-43159-6. • 2006 – "Safe". Published by Granta in October 2006. • 2010 – "Foster". Faber and Faber, London. ISBN 978-0-571-25565-8. (First published in The New Yorker, February 15, 2010) • 2010 — "Men and Women". Published in The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story. ISBN 978-1-847-08097-4. • 2022 – "So Late in the Day". Published in The New Yorker, 21 February 2022.

• 1999 – Antarctica. Faber and Faber, London. ISBN 978-0-571-19712-5. • 2007 – Walk the Blue Fields. Faber and Faber, London. ISBN 978-0-571-23306-9. • 2019 – The Forester's Daughter. Faber and Faber, London. ISBN 978-0-571-35185-5. • 2023 – So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men. Grove Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-8021-6085-0.

• Claire Keegan at Aosdána • A reading of Foster by Evanna Lynch * * *