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Claire-Louise Bennett
Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before settling in Galway. Her short fiction and essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Penny Dreadful, The Moth, Colony, The Irish Times, The White Review and gorse. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize in 2013 and has received bursaries from the Arts Council and Galway City Council. Her debut novel, Pondwas published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2015 and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Her second novel, Checkout 19, is published by Jonathan Cape in August 2021.

Articles Available Online


The Russian Man

Fiction

Issue No. 27

Claire-Louise Bennett

Fiction

Issue No. 27

Many years ago a large Russian man with the longest tendrils of the softest white hair came to live in the fastest growing town...

poetry

Issue No. 13

Morning, Noon & Night

Claire-Louise Bennett

poetry

Issue No. 13

Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. It ought not to be too ripe – in fact there should...

1 I see your picture for the first time two summers ago, sometime in early July I am scrolling through Facebook, my forearms hurting from spending too much time at the computer, when I chance upon a picture of you with your arm around a girl I recognise from my time at art school I am taken by your face, the top half of which is covered by a pair of sunglasses, the bottom with a thick moustache You are wearing a full sleeve T-shirt, and a pair of headphones hang casually around your notably broad neck I can’t be sure given the fuzzy background, but it looks like you are standing in the middle of a busy marketplace ‘OMG full lowwww!’ someone comments beneath the picture ‘Full loweeeee1 is right!’ you reply Based on the delight on the girl’s face as she looks up at you, delirious from your attention, I assume a romantic bond I am jealous of her happiness, of her ability to hold you and look at you the way she does, in a way that I imagine I will never be able to I remember first encountering your photograph while sitting in my bedroom in my old family house in West Delhi, by the window overlooking the large sports complex with the cricket field and newly built swimming pool But this cannot be right Your photograph was uploaded on 2 July, 2016, well after my parents and I had relocated to their current house in North Delhi, in late 2013 I remember the first time I saw a series of pornographic magazines was in that old house, on a summer’s day in August 1995 Perhaps this is why my memory plays tricks on me, for I have since returned to your picture with the same furtive image-lust That day in ’95 I skipped school, pretending to be sick so that I could re-watch three video cassettes I had found in the TV cupboard some months earlier, none of which were explicit per se, but all of which contained a few

Contributor

August 2014

Claire-Louise Bennett

Contributor

August 2014

Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before settling in...

The Lady of the House

fiction

Issue No. 8

Claire-Louise Bennett

fiction

Issue No. 8

Wow it’s so still. Isn’t it eerie. Oh yes. So calm. Everything’s still. That’s right. Look at the rowers – look at how fast...

READ NEXT

Interview

March 2015

Interview with Jonathan Meades

Jamie Sutcliffe

Interview

March 2015

The television broadcasts of Jonathan Meades are marked by a surreal humour, a polymathic breadth of knowledge, and a...

Art

July 2014

Operation Paperclip

Naomi Pearce

Patrick Goddard

Art

July 2014

‘I began at this point to feel that politics was not something “out there” but something “in here” and of...

fiction

February 2016

The Reactive

Masande Ntshanga

fiction

February 2016

My back cramps on the toilet bowl. I stretch it. Then I take two more painkillers and look down...

 

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