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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...

(This work is an extract from a longer poem of the same name)       This is a site for production This is a site for presentation  What is to be produced? What is to be presented?  This is a site for the production and presentation of a particular kind of subject  A subject marked by its pursuit of liberty, by individualism and collectivity, competition and cooperation By the sophistication of its speech    This is what we do with our comfort  This is what we do with our plenty    You are watching me, and I begin to watch Rather than using the gift, I reflect upon it Cobwebs2 Among the cobwebs, there, gathering in the corner of the doorway, a form persists, a tool, a silence, towards cleaving, carving, separating us from one another politically, aesthetically, socially, so that we may create a demand for these things we make, that appear here, that we do not yet have a name for     Minds are bending to the shape of this walking stick    This is a violence that can be overcome      What stick or stone is at hand to jam this twentyfourhour self-improvement, self-understanding, self-actualisation and total education? 3       Imagined public space  imagined public law  and in the air  experience and habit float…  experience, he says, is the way through danger4   I wait for Him to come  And I am nothing outside of this  While waiting, I swim,  stalk the interior  One way to move through the world among many  I surround you in my way of moving, my becoming –  monotone address, edge and end  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 minutes    2  Two words –  equality and equivalence  these are frequencies in the expression  of chronic fragmentation and chronic totality      I didn’t want to individuate  and now I am nothing  but a self-interrupting whole,5 a memory full of holes  haunted by the unpolitical    Someone said that this is where our obsession with voice capital V comes from And that listening instead, is grounded in our experience of the sacred It is our

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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Art

September 2014

On the Ground

Teju Cole

Art

September 2014

I visited Palestine in early June 2014, just before the latest wave of calamity befell its people. For eight...

feature

October 2012

Crown of Thorns Starfish

Caspar Henderson

feature

October 2012

If you look into infinity what do you see? Your backside!  –Tristan Tzara   The drug-addict, drunk, wife-shooter and...

fiction

May 2015

A History of Money

Alan Pauls

TR. Ellie Robins

fiction

May 2015

He hasn’t yet turned fifteen when he sees his first dead person in the flesh. He’s somewhat astonished that...

 

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