ICC Hammersmith

Claire Keegan interviewed by Anne Flaherty

December 01, 2021 Irish Cultural Centre
ICC Hammersmith
Claire Keegan interviewed by Anne Flaherty
Show Notes

During the interview in this podcast Claire discusses her recently published novel Small Things Like These. Set in 1985 in New Ross, Co. Wexford during the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces his busiest season.  Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Claire Keegan grew up on a farm in Wicklow. Her first collection of short stories, Antarctica, was completed in 1998, for which she was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature. Her second short-story collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to enormous critical acclaim in 2007 and won the 2008 Edge Hill Prize for Short Stories. Foster, a short novel, was published in 2010 and won the Davy Byrnes Award. Claire currently holds the Briena Staunton Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Anne Flaherty: A journalist born in London and growing up in County Clare, Anne has worked for The Irish Press in Dublin and The Irish Times in Belfast as well as reporting from  Africa and Asia.  She is a graduate of  Trinity College Dublin, and holds an MA in Anglo-Irish Writing from Queen’s University Belfast and an MA in Children’s  Literature from the University of Surrey.