NewsClaire Keegan Wins the Davy Byrnes Award
Claire Keegan has won the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. Claire's short story Foster from a shortlist of six stories, and she was awarded the prize during a presentation at the Davy Byrnes pub in Dublin on 23rd June.
Richard Ford judged the competition and commented, "Foster puts on display an imposing array of formal beauties at the service of a deep and profound talent. It tells a conceivably simple story - a young child given up to grieving foster parents and then woefully wrested home again. Claire Keegan makes the reader sure that there are no simple stories, and that art is essential to life. In lifting a homely rural existence to our moral notice, she brings a thrilling synaesthetic instinct for the unexpected right word, and exhibits patient attention to life's vast consequence and finality. She knows when to linger and never does so without profit, and indeed is never timid about saying more when less would be less. In this way she is a generous writer, always urging her sentences onward, adventurously extending our understanding, upping the ante, never obscuring or taking shelter in what can't be known. Yet sparkling talent aside, this is by no means a gaudy story - but a rather muted and decorous one entrusted to the voice of a child infused with the imagination of a seer. And yet to read it word upon word (as one must) is to experience a high-wire act of uncommon narrative virtuosity."
Claire Keegan has published two collections of short stories, Antarctica (1999) and Walk the Blue Fields (2007). She studied at Loyola University in New Orleans, the University of Wales, and Trinity College Dublin. Among her many previous awards are the Macaulay Fellowship, The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the William Trevor Prize, judged by William Trevor himself.