Keegan was born in 1968, and grew up on a 53-acre farm, where she was the youngest of six. “You could argue that both books are about that.” “There were so many unwanted children that were born into that society,” said Keegan. But she sees the strain on mothers, and the resulting scarcity of love, as a common thread in both books. Keegan didn’t set out to write a critique of misogyny and gender inequality in Irish society, or to invoke the horrors of the Magdalene Laundries, she said. “There’s such a precision to what she notices.” “She is able to tell a story in a paragraph, or to compress a novel into a few thousand words,” said Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker, which published an abridged version of “Foster” in 2010.
Writing in The New York Times, the novelist Alex Gilvarry called it “a master class in child narration” and argued that“Foster” is as rich and emotionally resonant as a “heaping 400-page tome.” Set in rural Ireland in the early 1980s, it unfolds from the perspective of a young girl who is sent away for the summer to live with a foster family while her mother struggles to care for a newborn and the girl’s many siblings. Now one of her earlier works, “Foster,” which was released as a short story more than a decade ago, is being published in the United States as a stand-alone book for the first time. This year, her 2021 novella, “Small Things Like These,” about an Irish coal merchant who discovers a disheveled, barefoot girl locked in the coal shed of a Catholic convent, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and praised by judges for its “beautiful, clear, economic writing.” At 114 pages, it is the shortest book to be recognized in the prize’s history. “She’s so utterly in control,” said Douglas Stuart, the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel “Shuggie Bain.” “She can say so much, and be so loud, with very little.” Prominent novelists like Colm Tóibín, Lily King, David Mitchell and Richard Ford have lauded her work with an admiration that borders on reverence.
Her work is a staple on school curriculums, and has won a slew of prizes and a passionate following among independent booksellers. “Otherwise I might have just stuck my head in a book.”Īs it turned out, Keegan made a career out of her imagination.ĭespite her sparse output - she’s released just four books over two decades - Keegan has gained a towering reputation as one of Ireland’s canonical writers.
“I’m not sure that growing up without books was a bad thing, because I had to use my imagination,” she said. In her home in southeast Ireland, where her family ran a sheep, pig and cattle farm, there were just a couple of books around the house - an illustrated edition of the Bible, and a cookbook, she recalls. Claire Keegan didn’t read much as a child.
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