Authors Like Claire Keegan

William Trevor

Irish · b. 1928 · Short-story writer and novelist · Whitbread Book of the Year 1994

Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928, and spent more than fifty years writing stories and short novels about provincial Irish and English lives quietly ruined by one decision or one failure of nerve. The Story of Lucy Gault, about a girl whose parents leave Ireland believing she has drowned, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002. He was given an honorary knighthood in 2002 and died in 2016. He chose Keegan's first collection, Antarctica, for the prize named after him.

Every book by William Trevor →

John McGahern

Irish · b. 1934 · Novelist

McGahern grew up in Leitrim and Roscommon. His second novel, The Dark (1965), was banned in Ireland and he lost his teaching job in Dublin as a result. Amongst Women, about a former IRA man ruling his daughters on a small farm, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1990; That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002) follows a year among the neighbours of a lake. He died in 2006.

Colm Tóibín

Irish · b. 1955 · Novelist

Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in 1955, and has set much of his fiction there. Brooklyn, about a young woman who emigrates to New York in the 1950s, won the Costa Novel Award; Nora Webster follows a widow rebuilding her life in Enniscorthy at the end of the 1960s; Long Island (2024) returns to the heroine of Brooklyn. The Master, about Henry James, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004.

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Anne Enright

Irish · b. 1962 · Novelist · Booker 2007

Enright was born in Dublin in 1962. The Gathering, in which a woman returns for the wake of her brother, who has taken his own life, and works back through three generations of family secrets, won the Booker Prize in 2007. The Green Road, about four grown children called home to the west of Ireland by their mother, was Irish Novel of the Year in 2015.

Sebastian Barry

Irish · b. 1955 · Novelist and playwright · Costa Book of the Year 2008

Barry recovers the lives of people left out of Irish history, often members of his own family. The Secret Scripture, narrated by a woman who has spent decades in a Irish psychiatric hospital, won the Costa Book of the Year in 2008, and Days Without End, about an Irish emigrant soldier in the American West, won it again in 2016; he is the only writer to have won it twice.

Alice Munro

Canadian · b. 1931 · Short-story writer · Nobel 2013

Munro spent her whole career writing short stories, most of them set in small-town Ontario, that carry the time-span of a novel. She won the Nobel Prize in 2013 as “master of the contemporary short story” and died in May 2024. Two months later her daughter Andrea Skinner wrote in the Toronto Star that Munro's husband, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her as a child and that Munro had stayed with him after learning of it; Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecent assault in 2005.

Every book by Alice Munro →

Kent Haruf

American · b. 1943 · Novelist

Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, and set all six of his novels in the fictional plains town of Holt. Plainsong, about a teacher, a pregnant teenager and two elderly bachelor farmers, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Our Souls at Night, about two widowed neighbours who begin spending their nights together, was published in 2015, the year after his death.

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Anton Chekhov

Russian · b. 1860 · Short-story writer and playwright

Chekhov trained and worked as a doctor while writing hundreds of short stories, and later the plays The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. His stories, among them “Peasants” and “The Lady with the Dog”, changed the short story into a form built on implication rather than plot. He died of tuberculosis in 1904, at forty-four.

Every book by Anton Chekhov →

Flannery O'Connor

American · b. 1925 · Short-story writer · National Book Award 1972

O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, lived most of her adult life on her mother's farm near Milledgeville after a lupus diagnosis in 1950, and died in 1964 at thirty-nine. A devout Catholic, she wrote two novels and two collections of stories about grace arriving violently in the rural South. The Complete Stories won the National Book Award in 1972. Her published letters contain racist remarks, and in 2020 Loyola University Maryland removed her name from a residence hall.

Every book by Flannery O'Connor →

Donal Ryan

Irish · b. 1976 · Novelist

Ryan was born in north Tipperary in 1976 and worked as a civil servant at the National Employment Rights Authority; his first two novels were rejected dozens of times before publication. The Spinning Heart, set in a rural village after the Celtic Tiger crash and told in twenty-one voices, won the Guardian First Book Award and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013. He received the European Union Prize for Literature in 2015.