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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...

‘People always say you can’t change the past,’ suggests Sarah Moss in her interview in this issue, ‘but of course you can change the past completely, because you can tell a different story about it’ Moss’s books, as Hannah Rosefield writes, ‘negotiate the past and imagine the future’: she discusses optimism, fridge-magnet clichés, the dangers of nationalist nostalgia (particularly in relation to contemporary nature writing), and how to ‘perform love by work’   Several of Moss’s novels are written in the voices of children, a perspective – raw, unfiltered, perhaps unreliable, often seeking self-definition or belonging – which recurs throughout this issue of The White Review In ‘Fried Egg’, a discomfiting story by Spanish writer Sabina Urraca (tr Thomas Bunstead), a woman who has retreated to a haunted house in an attempt to disconnect from society recalls an incongruous childhood in a sinister anti-natal commune Elvia Wilk’s essay ‘Kids in the Field’ dissects the knotty dissonance inherent in growing up as the child of anthropologists Her unstable memories of her childhood in Belize – and her uncomfortable return – are interspersed with a nuanced examination of the anthropological discipline’s historical baggage, the sociological and emotional implications of growing up in a culture not your own, and the possibilities and limits of ‘assimilation’   We publish new fiction – her first in two years – by Claire-Louise Bennett, a supermarket reverie transporting us from the aisles of a suburban retail park to the velveteen splendour of the Viennese opera Fernanda Melchor’s essay ‘Veracruz with a Zee for Zeta’ (tr Sophie Hughes) examines life in contemporary Mexico through a series of violent vignettes set in its beaches, nightclubs, supermarkets, streets and homes Readers of Melchor’s explosive novel Hurricane Season will recognise her propulsive torrents of prose, her polyvocal narrative style, and her rage against power ‘Extremity’ by Taiwanese writer Hsu Yu-Chen (tr Jeremy Tiang) is an acerbic and poignant story of queer desire and loneliness: although in May 2019 Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage, the elections of this January were characterised by virulently homophobic rhetoric directed at President Tsai Ing-Wen, who had signed the bill into law   Rosanna Mclaughlin interviews artist Samara Scott, whose work collects and collages used materials, from

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...

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Interview

May 2014

Interview with Eimear McBride

David Collard

Interview

May 2014

Eimear McBride’s first book, the radically experimental A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, was written when she was 27 and...

Interview

October 2014

Interview with Otobong Nkanga

Louisa Elderton

Interview

October 2014

Some things are meant to be lost. You can’t collect emotions. As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this,...

feature

November 2014

The Last Redoubt

Scott Esposito

feature

November 2014

As they say of politics, I have found essay-writing to be the art of the possible. Certain work can...

 

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