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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...

Valentine’s Day 2010, Brooklyn: an intern at the Paris Review skips his shift as an undocumented worker at an Upper East Side restaurant to have drinks with a BBC journalist and art critic visiting New York The White Review is born, or at least the drunken idea of it   A year later we launched the first print issue at Daunt Books in London’s Cheapside An unholy coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats had recently formed a government, promptly tripling tuition fees and sparking protests The first shots in the Arab Spring had been fired; anti-austerity protests in Greece exposed cracks in the facade of European solidarity that would swiftly widen; Donald Trump was briefly a frontrunner for the Republican candidacy, though his eventual decision not to stand still felt then like the inevitable triumph of sanity over satire Meanwhile, print journalism and book publishing was dying a slow death – remember the digital revolution? – and we intended to do something, though we didn’t know quite what, about it     The desire to launch a magazine was born out of our respective frustrations at the state of contemporary publishing in London, and indeed cultural and political commentary in the United Kingdom Where could an aspiring writer-critic-editor (whatever it was we were back then) hope to get published? The established literary magazines at home seemed to be closed shops, conservative either in their politics or their tastes (there were exceptions, we discovered retrospectively, among them the poetry journals Clinic and Popshot) We lamented the decline of cultural criticism and essay-length journalism, forms which seemed increasingly in danger of confinement to the ivory tower We were exasperated that the visual arts, so central to London’s culture, were so often made inaccessible to audiences without the theoretical training demanded by gatekeepers determined to protect their own territory So, inspired by the success of little magazines in New York – The Paris Review, n1,

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

fiction

March 2013

If Not, Not

Natasha Soobramanien

fiction

March 2013

This story may or may not end in Venice and in silent, unacknowledged tragedy but let it begin here,...

Essay

Issue No. 18

The Disquieting Muses

Leslie Jamison

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   In Within Heaven and Hell (1996), Ellen Cantor’s voice-over tells the story of a doomed love affair...

Art

November 2012

7 1/2 mile hike to Mohonk Lake via Duck Pond

Patricia Niven

JA Murrin

Art

November 2012

Notes on a Walk Never Taken by JA Murrin   As a writer I like to visit the places...

 

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