Seminar: How Fiction Works with Claire Keegan

Saturday 15th February; 10.30am–4.30pm
Duration: 1 Day; Cost: €80/€70 members

This will be a day of concentrating on text through claire keegan's eyes. Participants will be asked to consider and reconsider the structure of a narrative. What does it mean to begin? What is an ending? And how is this achieved? What is tension? And how and why does tension rise and fall? Or not rise at all? Every participant will be asked to bring what they each consider to be a fine and a poor paragraph of prose (may be published or unpublished). Claire will lead you through the structure of a paragraph and will demonstrate how time and movement and static work – and do not work – within a piece of fiction.

Claire Keegan grew up on the Wicklow / Wexford border, studied Literature and Politics at Loyola University, New Orleans, and subsequently earned an MA at the University of Wales and an M.Phil in Trinity College, Dublin. Her debut, Antartica was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. The Observer called these stories "among the finest recently written in English". In 2007, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to huge critical acclaim and went on to win The Edge Hill Prize for the strongest collection published in The British Isles that year. Foster (2010) won The Davy Byrnes Award, judged by Richard Ford: "Keegan is a rarity - someone I will always want to read." The story was subsequently published by Faber, abridged for The New Yorker, shortlisted for the 2010 Kerry Fiction Prize and published in Best American Stories, 2010.  Her stories have been translated into 12 languages. "Every line seems to be a lesson in the perfect deployment of both style and emotion" Hilary Mantel. A member of Aosdana, Keegan now lives on the Wexford coast.