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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...

#DROWNINGNOTDROWNING   to find me, plausible and aspiring in a relevant dress and full of promise oh internet, oh tumblr, at twenty your sunniest meme is a church i enter, mouth full of feigning: i will be well to find me so, industrious and suffering sweet bean or sesame, darkest soy, an oyster sauce i squeeze from me my pores are little sepulchres: my face is thick with foreign bodies my face is foreign bodies you don’t know except you do i do not know about anything, weary and sleek at three am what is it to be so heavy with lustre that you can’t even? in my vault of suspect valentines, a boy whose kiss is an absolute brat and it wants what it wants he said i had become intense he lead me not into temptation in the night, when the body is its realest zoo, couldn’t we all use a few of those flavourless mercies? and by mercy, a kind of white-people tea you drink it off hot and without sugar me, when the heart turns watertight me, at half the speed of me>> <<to find you, i won’t days of lulling wound, i know, when hands cannot comply youth is being in the world and the serpent under it: better to have not been born is the penitent subtext of all our comic fonts oh internet, oh, blog of blogs atypical silk of self cut, and a softer filter over us a squealing dream at night i’m unzipping a damsel i’m climbing in through her face to say yes and i thought if i could lay my shadow in a stranger’s lap, could stretch myself the length of my light reading, i would be sane i would drain the blank page like solemn milk i fail by theft, by thrift, by pills, by mania’s several devices to find you if anyone could if i could reach back through the rabbit for the hat paranoid, and nobody wants to fuck that thought nobody wants to deal what does it mean to go under? to become: sclerite, the spiny element in me kelps and corals, colonial forms, good sea-stalwarts all down through fleabane, limonium, and sweetest vulgare a red finger gropes for

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...

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poetry

Issue No. 18

Two New Poems

Dorothea Lasky

poetry

Issue No. 18

Do You Want To Dip The Rat   Do you want to dip the rat Completely in oil  ...

Art

August 2017

Becoming Alice Neel

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel...

fiction

Issue No. 12

A Samurai Watches the Sun Rise in Acapulco

Álvaro Enrigue

TR. Rahul Bery

fiction

Issue No. 12

To Miquel   I possess my death. She is in my hands and within the spirals of my inner...

 

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