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Sat, 02 Mar, 2024 - 02:59

The success of Small Things Like These and Foster has brought Claire Keegan’s extraordinary talent to the world and made her one of our most beloved writers.

This year we’ll see the highly anticipated big-screen adaptation of Small Things Like These, starring and co-produced by Cillian Murphy. It follows the remarkable success of Colm Bairéad’s Irish-language adaptation of her novel Foster ( An Cailín Ciúin), which was nominated for Best International Feature at the Oscars.

Filmmakers are falling for the work of Keegan just as readers have. “I’m delighted that they’re interested in making films out of my work and I just wish them well. It’s very simple for me, I stay completely out of it all,” she says.

Keegan’s focus remains on writing and another great passion.

“I love teaching. I love my students and I’m indebted to them for making me have the patience to spend the time all those years on the text that I didn’t want to spend time on sometimes. To make me sit down and develop the skills that it takes to stare at and study paragraphs and get more and more deeply interested in them, and learn how they work.”

Claire Keegan: 'I always had a decent measure of disregard for what others are doing, to keep my head down and follow my own road'

Raised on a farm in Co Wicklow, Keegan’s stories have been translated into more than 35 languages. Her short story collection Antarctica in 1999 was an LA Times Book of the Year. In 2007, Walk the Blue Fields was published to widespread critical acclaim. Foster won the Davy Byrnes award and was selected by The Times as one of the top fifty works of fiction published in the 21st century. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, and has just been added to the Leaving Cert curriculum. So Late in the Day was published to further acclaim in 2023.

Did she grow up in an environment where it was possible to consider becoming a storyteller?

“Everyone was a storyteller really, in one way or another. Anybody with any personality would tell a story. But no, certainly not a writer.

Nobody knew anybody who was a writer and earned a living as a writer. You might as well have wanted to be an astronaut.

In an interview with The Guardian, Keegan said: “I love to see prose written economically. Elegance is saying just enough and I do believe that the reader completes the story.”

“I suppose maybe it’s a reaction to the amount of excess I’ve seen in the world,” she adds now. “I’m not sure that excess has ever excited me or made me want to have it in my life.

“I always had a decent measure of disregard for what others are doing, to keep my head down and follow my own road. Good stories are told with varying degrees of reluctance, so I just try to write with equanimity. Write with composure in the face of difficulty.”