Claire Keegan was raised on a farm on the Wicklow/Wexford border. Her works have won numerous awards and are translated into more than thirty languages.

Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster, after winning the Davy Byrnes Award — then the world’s richest prize for a story — was chosen by The Times as one of the top 50 works to be published in the 21st Century. It is now part of the school syllabus in Ireland.

Her latest, Small Things Like These, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. It won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Ambassadors’ Prize for best Irish novel published in France, and The Kerry Prize for best Irish Novel of the year. It is now nominated for the Dublin Literary Award which is presented annually for the best novel in the world written or translated into English.