Sydney Writers' Festival: Claire Keegan

A modern master of short fiction, Claire Keegan has gained a towering reputation as one of Ireland’s finest writers. Hear from her as she casts light on her influential body of work, including the 2022 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Small Things Like These, which tells the story of a father who confronts the truth of one of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries, and has drawn praise as a “tender, condensed and pitch-perfect book” (The Independent). Claire speaks with ABC RN’s The Bookshelf’s Kate Evans.

Supported by the Consulate General of Ireland.

About Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan’s stories are translated into thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize, awarded to the best collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award, one of the richest literary prizes in the world, and was last year chosen by The Times as one of the top fifty works of fiction to be published in the twenty-first century. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and for the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the best work of literature, regardless of form, to be published in the English language, and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.