Crossing Border Festival – conversation with Claire Keegan (Embassy of Ireland)

On the November 6 Irish author Claire Keegan will be participating during Crossing Border Festival, a literature and music festival taking place in the Hague from the 4th to the 6th of November 2021.

During an interview hosted by Helena Hoogenkamp, the Irish master of the short story Claire Keegan will talk about her new work ‘Small things like these’, an unforgettable story about the price of courage, quiet heroism, and tenderness. Set in Catholic Ireland in the 1980s, it asks profound and universal questions.

About the book: It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. He feels blessed with his own business, a wife and five smart daughters. He knows he’s been lucky. His mother was thrown out on the street after getting pregnant at age fifteen but found work and a place to stay as a housekeeper for a wealthy lady, allowing Bill to go to school. On Christmas Eve, he delivers his last order at the local monastery, where schools exploit young women in the laundromat under the guise of re-education. There he discovers something that leads to a decision that will change his life forever.

Are you curious about this conversation with the author, and would you like to read more on Claire Keegan and the other events that see her as main guest? Click here!