Claire Keegan interview: ‘I don’t actually believe in plot, because life doesn’t have one’

An adaptation of Wicklow-born novelist Claire Keegan’s book Foster will soon hit our screens, even as her latest novel Small Things Like These continues to be an Irish bestseller

Claire Keegan: ‘I know this sounds like a smart answer, but it really isn’t: I try and write one decent sentence. And I try to find the next decent sentence that goes alongside of it.’ Picture: Frédéric Stucin/Pasco

As I speak to Claire Keegan – she in a stormy Mayo, me in a relatively calm Dublin – she’s finishing off writing a short story for the New Yorker. It’s an apt task, considering it was in that magazine, in February 2010, that her long short story Foster was first published.

At the time, Keegan had already published two much-lauded short story collections, Antarctica (Faber, 1999) and Walk the Blue Fields (Faber, 2007), and ...