The first Art of Reading book club features Colm in conversation with Claire Keegan about her latest work Small Things Like These. Listen here or watch below. 

This short novel manages to dramatize both private life and public matters. It does so by working in careful, meticulous, emotionally-accurate detail, making no grand statements about character or circumstance. Everything is intimate, almost low-key, and yet the implications of the narrative are far-reaching.  

Claire Keegan’s debut collection of stories, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. The Observer called these stories: ‘Among the finest recently written in English’. It was also awarded the William Trevor Prize, judged by William Trevor. In 2007, her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to huge critical acclaim and went on to win The Edge Hill Prize for the strongest collection published in The British Isles. The prize was adjudicated by Hilary Mantel. Foster (2010) won The Davy Byrnes Award, then the world’s richest prize for a story. It judged by Richard Ford: “Keegan is a rarity-someone I will always want to read’.” 

Keegan’s stories are published in English by Faber & Faber, have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, Best American Stories, won numerous awards – and are translated into 17 languages.  She is internationally renowned as a teacher of creative writing. 

Her most recent work, Small Things Like These, was published in late 2021.

Details of The Art of Reading Book Club monthly events can be found (as they become available) on the Arts Council website at: https://www.artscouncil.ie/laureate/ via Facebook at www.facebook.com/LaureateIrishFiction and follow @LaureateFiction on Twitter #TheArtofReading, Instagram laureateirishfiction, and on the Arts Council podcast channel 

The Art of Reading Book Club is an initiative of the Arts Council and the Laureate for Irish Fiction, in partnership with Libraries Ireland.