Claire-Louise Bennett is a British writer, living in Galway in Ireland. [1] She is the author of the books Pond (2015), [2] which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, [3] and Checkout 19 (2021), [4] which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. [5]
Bennett grew up in a working-class family in Wiltshire, South-West England. She studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton in London. She emigrated from the UK to Galway in Ireland around the turn of the millennium. [1]
Her debut book, Pond (2015), a collection of 20 interconnected stories, was very positively reviewed, with Andrew Gallix in The Guardian concluding: "This is a truly stunning debut, beautifully written and profoundly witty." [6] Meghan O'Rourke wrote in The New York Times : "More than anything this book reminded me of the kind of old-fashioned British children’s books I read growing up — books steeped in contrarianism and magic, delicious scones and inviting ponds, otherworldly yet bracingly real. ... Despite its occasional unevenness, 'Pond' makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent." [7] According to Brian Dillon, reviewing it for the London Review of Books , "At its best, in the longer stories such as 'Lady of the House' and 'Morning, Noon & Night', Pond is all that its author admires in others: a work of gorgeous stylistic and structural ambition, deadpan comedy and profound, that is to say profoundly odd, expression." [8]
Bennett's 2021 novel, Checkout 19 , was described by Leo Robson in The Guardian as an "elatingly risky and irreducible book", [9] and was characterised in the TLS by Desirée Baptiste as "really a collection of seven vignettes (essay-stories) offering glimpses of the unnamed narrator’s younger self, throughout her reading and writing life. ... Checkout 19 is utterly original, fashioned from the many narratives (books read, stories written, ideologies debunked) that have shaped a female working-class writer’s distinctive sensibility." [10] Praising Checkout 19 in The Scotsman , literary critic Stuart Kelly said: "This is one of the most extraordinary books it has been my privilege to review. ... If I were a Booker judge again, I would move heaven and earth to get this on the shortlist." [11]
Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
"Invisible bird" | 2022 | Bennett, Claire-Louise (30 May 2022). "Invisible bird". The New Yorker. Vol. 98, no. 14. pp. 54–59. | ||
Charlotte Wood is an Australian novelist. The Australian newspaper described Wood as "one of our [Australia's] most original and provocative writers".
The Dylan Thomas Prize is a leading prize for young writers presented annually. The prize, named in honour of the Welsh writer and poet Dylan Thomas, brings international prestige and a remuneration of £30,000 (~$46,000). It is open to published writers in the English language under the age of forty. The prize was originally awarded biennially but became an annual award in 2010. Entries for the prize are submitted by the publisher, editor, or agent; for theatre plays and screenplays, by the producer.
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.
Gwendoline Riley is an English writer.
Jane Harris is a British writer of fiction and screenplays. Her novels have been published in over 20 territories worldwide and translated into many different languages. Her most recent work is the novel Sugar Money which has been shortlisted for several literary prizes.
Monique Pauline Roffey is a Trinidadian-born British writer and memoirist. Her novels have been much acclaimed, winning awards including the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for Archipelago, and the Costa Book of the Year award, for The Mermaid of Black Conch in 2021.
Sarah Grace Perry is an English author. She has had four novels published: After Me Comes the Flood (2014), The Essex Serpent (2016), Melmoth (2018) and Enlightenment (2024). Her work has been translated into 22 languages. She was appointed Chancellor of the University of Essex in July 2023, officially starting in this role on 1 August 2023.
The Goldsmiths Prize is a British literary award, founded in 2013 by Goldsmiths, University of London, in association with the New Statesman. It is awarded annually to a piece of fiction that "breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form." It is limited to citizens and residents of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and to novels published by presses based in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner receives £10,000. Tim Parnell of the Goldsmiths English department conceived and runs the prize, inspired by his research into Laurence Sterne and other eighteenth-century writers, like Denis Diderot, who experimented with the novel form. The prize "casts its net wider than most other prizes" and intends to celebrate "creative daring," but resists the phrase "experimental fiction," because it implies "an eccentric deviation from the novel’s natural concerns, structures and idioms." To date, Rachel Cusk is the author best represented on the prize's shortlists, having been shortlisted for each book of her Outline trilogy.
Frances Wilson is an English author, academic, and critic.
Chigozie Obioma is a Nigerian writer who wrote the novels The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize in their respective years of publication. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Imachibundu Oluwadara Onuzo is a Nigerian novelist. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, won a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ is a Nigerian writer. Her 2017 debut novel, Stay With Me, won the 9mobile Prize for Literature and the Prix Les Afriques. She was awarded The Future Awards Africa Prize for Arts and Culture in 2017.
Sara Baume is an Irish novelist. She was named on Granta magazine's "Best of Young British Novelists" list 2023.
Claire G. Coleman is a Wirlomin-Noongar-Australian writer and poet, whose 2017 debut novel, Terra Nullius won the Norma K Hemming Award. The first draft of resulted in Coleman being awarded the State Library of Queensland's 2016 black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship.
Pond is a collection of 20 short stories written by Claire-Louise Bennett, originally published by The Stinging Fly Press in Ireland on 10 May 2015 (ISBN 0-3995-7590-1). The stories are written from the perspective of an unnamed woman who lives a solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village.
Will Harris is a London-based poet of Chinese Indonesian and British heritage. His debut poetry book RENDANG won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021. His poem SAY was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2018. In 2019, Harris received a Poetry Fellowship from the Arts Foundation.
Louise Milligan is an Australian author and investigative reporter for the ABC TV Four Corners program. As of March 2021, she is the author of two award-winning non-fiction books. Her first novel, Pheasants Nest, was published in 2024.
Checkout 19 is a novel by British writer Claire-Louise Bennett. It is Bennet's second book, after 2015's Pond. It was selected for The New York Times's "10 Best Books of 2022" list. The book was also shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, which seeks to celebrate novels which expand the possibilities of the novel as an art form. The novel follows an unnamed female narrator from early childhood to adulthood, documenting her interactions with books and how those interactions shaped her life. The book has been described as an example of autofiction, or a fictionalized, autobiographical account of Bennett's life.
Grief is the Thing with Feathers is the debut book by Max Porter, a novella about grief, published in 2015.
Louise Kennedy is an Irish writer.