Antarctica

Description

Antarctica, the debut volume of stories from Claire Keegan, introduces an exceptionally gifted and versatile writer.'Here really is an exciting first book of deliberate, contemplative short stories.The aesthetic here is always the appeal to the palpabilty of language itself. Suggestions of Heaney and Frost travel through the prose.' Observer

Claire Keegan was born in 1968 and grew up on a farm in Wicklow, the youngest of a large Catholic family. She travelled to New Orleans, Louisiana when she was seventeen and studied English and Political Science at Loyola University. She returned to Ireland in 1992. She started writing in 1994 and lived for a year in Cardiff. She took an MA in Creative Writing and taught undergraduates for a year at the University of Wales.Her first collection of short stories, Antarctica, was completed in 1998. It announced her as an exceptionally gifted and versatile writer of contemporary fiction and was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature. She is currently working on a second collection of stories and her d but novel. She is also finishing another MA, this time at Trinity College, Dublin.Claire Keegan lives in County Louth, Ireland.