IRISH AUTHOR Claire Keegan has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her novel 'Small Things Like These'.
The shortlist was announced at a ceremony in London yesterday evening, with the winner to be announced at the Roundhouse on 17 October.
The novel tells the story of Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant in a small Irish town who is about to face his busiest season in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1985. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a small community controlled by the Church.
According to the judges, "it is the tale, simply told, of one ordinary middle-aged man" who "slowly grasps the enormity of the local convent’s heartless treatment of unmarried mothers and their babies (one instance of what will soon be exposed as the scandal of the Magdalene laundries)".
Keegan is up against five other authors and their work, with all shortlisted novels set in different places and at different times.
These include 'Glory' by NoViolet Bulawayo, 'Treacle Water' by Alan Garner, 'The Trees' by Percival Everett, 'The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida' by Sheahan Karunatilaka and 'Oh William!' by Elizabeth Strout.
The six authors represent five different nationalities and four continents, with an equal split of men and women on the list.
The majority of the works are inspired by real events, with Keegan's novel also the shortest book to be recognised in the prize's history.
Keegan is from Wicklow and was brought up on a farm in Ireland. At the age of 17, she travelled to New Orleans, where she studied English and Political Science at Loyola University. She returned to Ireland in 1992, and her highly acclaimed first volume of short stories - Antarctica - was published in 1999.
Her stories have been translated into 30 languages and have won numerous accolades. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize, awarded to the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award and was last year chosen by The Times as one of the top 50 works of fiction to be published in the 21st century. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the 2022 Rathbones Folio Prize. It won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022.
Foster is also the inspiration behind the critically acclaimed Irish language film An Cailín Ciúin.
Alan Garner is also of note as his is the oldest person to be shortlisted, and will celebrate his 88th birthday on the night the winner is announced.
An extract of Keegan's work can be read here.
