Claire Keegan

Claire Keegan is an Irish novelist and short story writer born in County Wicklow in 1968. She studied at Loyola University New Orleans and at University College Dublin, and has taught creative writing at Trinity College Dublin. Her debut story collection Antarctica (1999) announced a remarkable new voice in Irish fiction. Foster (2010), a novella, is one of the most celebrated works of short Irish fiction of the century — a masterpiece of compression about a young girl sent to stay with a childless couple in rural Wexford for the summer, written in precise, elemental prose. It was adapted into a feature film, The Quiet Girl, which won the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language and an Academy Award nomination in 2023. Small Things Like These (2021), a novella set in a small Irish town in 1985, follows a coal merchant who discovers that the convent's laundry operates a Magdalene institution. It won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2022 and has since sold millions of copies worldwide, adapted for film with Cillian Murphy in 2024. Her story collection Walk the Blue Fields appeared in 2007.