Guest of the ilb 2005
Claire Keegan was born in
County Wicklow, Ireland in 1968 and grew up as the youngest child in a
large Catholic family in rural surroundings. At age seventeen she
travelled to New Orleans where she studied English Literature and
Political Theory at Loyola University. Upon returning to Ireland she
began writing short stories and completed a Master’s degree in Creative
Writing in Cardiff, Wales. She took a further degree from the
Philosophy Faculty of Trinity College, Dublin.
Keegan was first noticed in 1998 when her short story »Storm« won the
Francis McManus Award. The text is also found in her first short story
collection, »Antarctica« (1999), published one year later. Since then
Keegan has been considered one of the most important new voices in
Irish literature, and has been compared to writers such as William
Trevor and Raymond Carver. In her short stories she evokes the
precariousness of everyday life, whose uniformity is endangered by
potential catastrophes and within whose security an accident can always
occur. Succinct and precise, Keegan creates – sometimes through an
authorial voice, sometimes through the voice of a character – near
novella-like sketches almost like test arrangements in which she
prepares her middle class characters for a disaster in their lives,
which eventually arrives, is averted or else fails to appear following
an unexpected twist. The happily married Englishwoman, who feels she
may have missed out and commits an infidelity; the American fisherman
who discovers he has invited a murderer onto his boat; the young Irish
au pair whose nightmares warn her of a danger to her protégé; or the
woman who meets her lover again after a ten years gap: These are
precisely formed characters and individual destinies, which – often set
within religious contexts – make reference to the human condition. »The
risk inherent in being alive is always present for Claire Keegan«,
wrote Ingeborg Harms in the » Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung«. »She is
a voice reminding us that literary perception is no decadent amusement,
but rather provides an elemental orientation.«
Keegan was awarded, among other distinctions, the William Trevor Award
and the Rooney Prize for her literary début. She has also received
several scholarships and has been a writer in residence at University
College, Cork. The author teaches Creative Writing and is currently
working on her first novel and another collection of tales. In 2005 she
again won the McManus Award for her short story »Dark Horses«. Keegan
lives in County Monaghan in West Cork.
© internationales literaturfestival berlin
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Wo das Wasser am tiefsten ist
Steidl
Göttingen, 2004
T: Inge Leipold und Hans-Christian Oeser
Durch die blauen Felder
Steidl
Göttingen, 2008
T: Hans-Christian Oeser | 
