Claire Keegan

Claire Keegan
Born	1968 (age 55–56) County Wicklow, Ireland
Occupation	Short story writer
Notable works	Antarctica, Walk the Blue Fields "Foster"
Notable awards	Rooney Prize for Irish Literature 2000

Claire Keegan (born 1968) is an Irish writer known for her award-winning short stories. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, The Paris Review and translated into 14 languages.

Biography

Born in County Wicklow in 1968, she is the youngest of a large Roman Catholic family. Keegan traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana when she was seventeen and studied English and Political Science at Loyola University. She returned to Ireland in 1992 and later lived for a year in Cardiff, Wales, where she undertook an MA in creative writing and taught undergraduates at the University of Wales.

Keegan's first collection of short stories Antarctica (1999) won a slew of awards, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year.. Her second collection of much awarded short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, was published in 2007. Keegan's acclaimed 'long, short story' "Foster" won the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009 American writer Richard Ford, who selected "Foster" as winner, wrote of Keegan's “thrilling” instinct for the right words and her “patient attention to life's vast consequence and finality".. Foster appeared in the New Yorker and was declared the “Best of the Year” by the New Yorker. It was later published by Faber and Faber in longer form. "Foster" is now included as a text for the Irish Leaving Certificate.

Keegan lives in rural Ireland.

List of works

• 1999 – Antarctica
• 2007 – Walk the Blue Fields
• 2010 – "Foster"

Awards and honours

Keegan has won the inaugural William Trevor Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Olive Cook Award and the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. Other awards include The Hugh Leonard Bursary, The Macaulay Fellowship, The Martin Healy Prize, The Kilkenny Prize and The Tom Gallon Award. Twice was Keegan the recipient of the Francis MacManus Award. She was also a Wingate Scholar. 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.

She is a member of Aosdána.

External links

• Claire Keegan at Aosdána
• "Claire Keegan: 'Short stories are limited. I'm cornered into writing what I can'", Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, 5 September 2010
• A copy of Foster and a recording of its abridged version by Evanna Lynch