Claire Keegan’s works of fiction are critically acclaimed international best sellers.

Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields received the Edge Hill Prize. Foster earned the Davy Byrnes Award.

Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, winning the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kerry Prize for Irish Novel of the Year.

So Late in the Day, first published in The New Yorker, was shortlisted for Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. Keegan was named Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland in 2022, Author of the Year in Ireland for 2023. In 2024 she was presented with the Markievicz Award from the Arts Council, and the Siegfried Lenz Award in Hamburg.

This year, the Irish Times readers chose Small Things Like These as their Book of the Century, and The Sunday Times critics chose it as Irish novel of the Century.

Join Claire as she chats with Kathryn Baird about the art of the short story and her most recent books Small Things Like These and So Late in the Day.

‘A genuine once-in-a-generation writer.’ The Times