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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...

I One week after Buzz and Heather broke up, she dragged her mattress into her living room She moved aside the coffee table and put the mattress in front of the TV Just a few weeks before, Buzz had done the same in his apartment so that he could stay up late and watch movies on his used tube TV One night, he’d arranged Heather naked in different positions on the mattress to take pictures of her Heather had secretly felt like Rose from Titanic, but knew that if she said it out loud, Buzz would dump her Heather both liked and disliked the feeling She’d felt subversive allowing herself to be objectified and observed so closely She also felt like a cheeseball thinking of herself as Rose and not as an obscure gamine at the Chelsea Hotel circa 1973   After the breakup, Heather moved her mattress to feel closer to Buzz, to sleep in the same position he was sleeping in But she also moved it to be closer to the television and further away from the bottomlessness of her hysterics She was crying all the time, and she knew the sadness was disproportionate to the romance She cried in the bathroom stall at work, in traffic on the way home In the evenings, she sat on her porch and watched the sun set at the far end of Augusta Avenue, crying into a jam jar full of whiskey, proud of the tableau she had created   The time had come to cauterise the wound Heather made up her bed on the floor, sat down with her cat, whose name was Fuzz, and turned on the television Last time she had had her heart broken, she and the cat had watched the entire run of Star Trek: The Next Generation She looked at the cat now What would it be this time?   II Sometime in the last decade I began watching TV again At first, the shows came on DVDs through the mail Then they came through the languid Internet of the late-naughts Now, they come full and robust and easy; streaming is the word

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

Issue No. 8

The White Review No. 8 Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 8

The manifesto of art collective Bruce High Quality foundation, the subject of an essay by Legacy Russell in this...

feature

June 2014

Hoarseness: A Legend of Contemporary Cairo

Youssef Rakha

feature

June 2014

U. Mubarak It kind of grows out of traffic. The staccato hiss of an exhaust pipe begins to sound like...

Essay

Issue No. 20

Notes on the history of a detention centre

Felix Bazalgette

Essay

Issue No. 20

Looking back at Harmondsworth as he left, after 52 days inside, Amir was struck by how isolated the detention...

 

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