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Claire-Louise Bennett

Biography

Claire-Louise Bennett

Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of CHECKOUT 19 and POND, which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and winner of the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize. Her short fiction and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s and other publications. She lives in Galway, Ireland.

Claire-Louise Bennett

Books by Claire-Louise Bennett

by Claire-Louise Bennett - Fiction

In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles stories in the back pages of her exercise book, intoxicated by the first sparks of her imagination. As she grows, everything and everyone she encounters become fuel for a burning talent. The large Russian man in the ancient maroon car who careens around the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, and slips her a copy of BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. The growing heaps of other books in which she loses --- and finds --- herself. Even the derailing of a friendship, in a devastating violation. The thrill of learning to conjure characters and scenarios in her head is matched by the exhilaration of forging her own way in the world.

by Claire-Louise Bennett - Fiction

Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut captures the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, the novel focuses on the details of a young woman’s daily experience --- rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood.