Claire Keegan was brought up on a farm in Ireland. Her stories have won numerous awards and have been translated into more than twenty languages. Foster was named by The Times as one of the top fifty works of fiction to be published in the twenty-first century and inspired the critically acclaimed film An Cailín Ciúin. Her novel Small Things Like These won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and The Orwell Prize for political fiction. It is currently longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.