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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...

Why I’m Not A Great Lover   The circumstances The zeitgeist   The inner uncertainty The lack of belief in something after   Literature The wrong music at the wrong time The creaking chandelier in the next room   The shouting of drunks down in the street The frost patterns on the window The poem by Rossetti By John Donne   The thought of giant octopuses Of umbilical cords Of porridge   The squeaking of the bedsprings The bitter smell of oranges consumed this morning The tons of soap, accumulated in the course of an entire life The three-legged dog, seen in a park fifteen years ago   The power outage in ’98 The atmosphere in the apartment in winter around four o’clock in the afternoon   The cold, insect-speckled light of the fluorescent tubes above us The toys under the bed in the box The neck muscle pains The sea     *     A Sentence from the Great French Encyclopédie of 1756   The human population on the planet is, in its size, constant and will remain constant until the end of humanity when no one is left on this earth     *     Theory of Literature   An infinite number of monkeys with typewriters, it is said, would ultimately produce the complete works of Shakespeare   And shortly thereafter the work of Dante, followed by Joyce, Goethe, Kafka, Dickens, Dostoyevsky   Then, after a few months, a few pieces of their own about things like paws, trees or eternal repetition Then a little Dostoyevsky again and all of Shakespeare, once again from the beginning, line by line   In between pieces about trees, about paws, about bananas, and about eternal repetition     *     These poems were selected for inclusion in the January 2015 Translation Issue by Daniel Medin, a contributing editor of The White Review He helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris, and is an editor of The Cahiers Series and Music & Literature

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

feature

February 2011

Middle East protests give lie to Western orthodoxies

Emanuelle Degli Esposti

feature

February 2011

For thousands of individuals across the Arab world, 2011 has already become the year in which the political and...

fiction

January 2016

Forgetting: Chang'e Descends to Earth, or Chang'e Escapes to the Moon

Li Er

TR. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen

fiction

January 2016

Source Material   Her story is widely known. At first she stayed in heaven, then she followed a man...

Interview

January 2015

Interview with Magdalena Tulli

TR. Bill Johnston

Grzegorz Jankowicz

Interview

January 2015

This interview appeared in Po co jest sztuka? (What Is Art For?), a 2013 collection of interviews with Polish...

 

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