C.K. tells stories about ordinary people, with whom we can meet and live together at any moment of our lives, in any part of the world, but who are subjected to extraordinary, stressful and oppressive situations. Her writing style is loose, light and uncompromising in its simplicity and beauty, in the spirit it embodies and the memories it stirs up, with the result that with a narrative as rich as this one, every sentence matters and has an impact on the overall effect. ( All good writing is suggestion; bad writing is statement,...) La otra característica en común que une a estos relatos es obviamente la autora. La prosa de Claire Keegan posee ciertos rasgos poéticos, pero es siempre concisa. Se detiene dónde cree que debe hacerlo y con razón. A eso hay que añadir que en todo momento se transmite una tensión latente, que no sabemos en qué momento ni cómo estallará. Detrás de esa calma de la vida rural se esconde alguna historia turbia, cruda y real. La melancolía por algo que no pudo ser o que se podía haber evitado se extiende hasta un punto que se torna retorcido, y Keegan no toma ningún reparo para decirlo. Lo suelta en el momento justo. Quizá el único cuento que se aleja un poco de esa perspectiva general es “Nombre raro para un niño”; incluso me pareció lindo. 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. 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]

It’s always married people who cry at weddings. They know the difference between the vows and the life.’ The first story, "Antarctica," is about a married woman who decides to find out what it might be like to sleep with a man other than her husband. 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."

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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? The story that made me cry was “Passport Soup,” about a man who loses his daughter in a field, and whose wife can never forgive him. Told from the guy’s point of view, just crushing, hopeless grief. Being clearly a superior writer Claire Keegan has a unique, natural and original voice. The discovery of her short stories (advised by my GR friend s.penkevich) was a truly pleasant surprise.

Something I liked in all the stories is how Keegan connects us with the environment. The natural world is always present, I think her descriptions of waves and oceans or cold mornings, or leaves on the floor really feed into the sensual element.

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. webmaster, Arts Council (12 October 2019). "Writer-in-Residence/Fellowship Appointments 2019/2020". www.artscouncil.ie. Keep going,” he said when she stopped on the landings. She giggled and climbed, giggled and climbed again, stopped at the top.