Beginner’s pluck: French-born writer Claire-Lise Kieffer

“And when we lived in the south of France, when I was seven to 11, I was free to roam in the mountains.”

She wrote stories, and always wanted to be a writer, until the world told her it was not possible.

“I recaptured the dream a few years ago,” she says.

She came to Ireland in 2017, and was working for a hiking tour company, but was made redundant in 2020.

When covid started I decided to use my redundancy money to take an MA in creative writing. It was all online.

Many of the stories featured in Tenterhooks started as submissions on her fiction class. Some of them were published.

“I’d been writing a lot before but never finishing anything. The course forced me to finish. We workshopped in class, and it helped that others were taking my writing seriously,” she says.

Claire-Lise won an Arts Council Agility Award in 2022, for her collection: “That bought me time.”

Who is Claire-Lise Kieffer?

Date/ place of birth: 1990/ Haguenau in France.

Education: A French public school in north eastern France. “It was a shock after school in the south of France where there had been a big emphasis on the arts.” University of Reims, and Lancaster University, Business; Galway University, MA in creative writing.

Home: Galway.

Family: “I’m happily single.”

The day job: Programme manager for the University of Notre Dame. “I’m developing a writing residency at Kylemore Abbey.”

In another life: “I would have been a farmer, as I come from a line of farmers.”

Favourite writers: Olge Tokarczuk; Claire Louise Bennett; Marguerite Duras; Ottessa Moshfegh; Sheila Heti, and Mike McCormack.

Second book: “I’m working on a novel. I got another Agility Award in 2024.”

Top tip: Aim for 100 rejections a year. “Rejections are OK. I got really close to 100.”

Instagram: @ClaireliseKieffer.

The debut

Tenterhooks

Banshee Press, €18.00/ Kindle, €6.00

From the title story, where a garda’s life is upturned by a discovery on a building site, to the strangeness of, Galway Sinking, these stories are pitch perfect.

The verdict: A wonderful, varied collection. Claire-Lise is a name to watch.