Booker Prize 2022: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These shortlisted

Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These has been announced as one of the six novels shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. The judges say “Keegan is measured and merciless as she dissects the silent acquiescence of a 1980s Irish town in the church’s cruel treatment of unmarried mothers – and the cost of one man’s moral courage.” The final contenders for the prestigious literary award were announced in London on Tuesday night.

Keegan’s novel, published by Faber, is shortlisted alongside NoViolet Bulawayo for Glory, Percival Everett for The Trees, Alan Garner for Treacle Walker, Shehan Karunatilaka for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, and Elizabeth Strout for Oh William!

The winner will be announced on Monday, October 17th, at the first in-person Booker Prize ceremony since 2019. The six shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 (€2,900) and a bound edition of their book. The winner will receive £50,000 (€58,000), as well as international recognition and an expected jump in sales.

[ Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan: a timely and powerful book ]

The shortlist represents five nationalities and four continents, with an equal split of women and men. Just one is British, and half are from independent publishers. It’s the second Booker shortlisting for Bulawayo, who is Zimbabwean. Most of the six novels are inspired by real events, from the Sri Lankan civil war and the fall of Robert Mugabe to the Magdalene-laundries scandal and the murder of Emmett Till. Alan Garner is the oldest author ever shortlisted, for Treacle Walker; his 88th birthday is the night of the winner’s ceremony.

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The chair of the judging panel, the cultural historian Neil MacGregor, says the six novels “speak powerfully about important things. Set in different places at different times, they are all about events that in some measure happen everywhere and concern us all. Each written in English, they demonstrate what an abundance of Englishes there are, how many distinct worlds, real and imaginary, exist in that simple-seeming space the Anglosphere.”

The shortlist was narrowed down from the Booker longlist of 13, announced on July 26th, which also featured The Colony, by the Irish novelist Audrey Magee, also published by Faber.

[ The Colony by Audrey Magee: rich in learning but loaded with literary devices ]

Keegan’s Small Things Like These, dedicated to the women and children who “suffered time” in the Magdalene laundries, and set in New Ross, Co Wexford, concerns one man’s dilemma about whether to break a wall of silence surrounding a mother-and-baby home.

At 116 pages, it is the shortest book recognised in the prize’s history (although Treacle Walker has a shorter word count). Another of the Booker judges, the novelist and critic M John Harrison, says he admires “the intensity of Small Things” and its “ability to compress, the ability to observe, particularly in closed communities or small, limiting communities”.

Small Things Like These has already won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and was also shortlisted for the 2022 Rathbones Folio Prize. Keegan says she wrote about 50 drafts of the novel, with the earliest versions being the hardest, as “all good stories are told with varying degrees of reluctance”. Of its brevity she comments that “Furlong, my central character, isn’t someone who says much … A longer novel would not have suited his personality.”

Antarctica, Keegan’s acclaimed first volume of short stories, was published in 1999, followed by Walk the Blue Fields in 2007. Her “long-short story” Foster, which won the 2009 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, is now a Leaving Cert text; it was adapted for film as the acclaimed An Cailín Ciúin in May this year. Keegan also holds the Briena Staunton visiting-writer fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

The Booker judges, who this year also include the academic Shahidha Bari, the historian Helen Castor and the novelist and professor Alain Mabanckou, selected the longlist from 169 novels written in English and published in Ireland or Britain between October 2021 and September 2022.

In longlisting Small Things Like These, the judges described it as a story of “quiet bravery, set in an Irish community in denial of its central secret”, with “beautiful, clear, economic writing and an elegant structure dense with moral themes”.

In The Irish Times’ review Sarah Gilmartin says it “brings a fresh and sensitive perspective to an awful period in our collective history. Detailed, insightful and written with striking economy of language, it gets the reader remarkably close to the experience of the character.”