“A word comes with its own social context, and the words I use have been around much, much longer than me.” Writer Claire-Louise Bennett gives a glimpse into her world of writing. On why it took her so long to get published, the history behind words and the impact of reading while writing.
“I was writing for a long time before I thought about getting published. And that was very deliberate,” Claire-Louise Bennett explains. “There were kind of formal issues that I had difficulty resolving. I was writing quite short pieces, quite fragmented pieces.” Bennett’s first book, Pond, was published in 2015 after many years of writing for her eyes only. At that time, she was also working with performance and theatre. “To then be professionalised and identified as a writer was quite a dramatic shift for me.”
“I knew that the way I wrote was a reflection on how I felt about being a human being.” Seven years after her debut novel, her second novel, Checkout 19, was published. In the book, “there are a lot of references to spoken language and family sayings.” Claire-Louise Bennett is highly aware of the impact words have and how loaded they can be: “They have their own history and their own connotations and their own associations. They’re not just sitting there in a box, completely neutral weight, waiting for me to arrange them into sentences to generate the meaning that I want there. There’s so much already going on with them.”
“I read a lot of work by some women who write really, really well about experiences from their earlier life. Like Annie Ernaux.” In Checkout 19, the work of other writers is referenced and highly present in the text. “I’m interested in ideas more than stories.” Works by Tove Ditlevsen, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, and Tove Jansson are all mentioned in the book. “One of the reasons why Checkout 19 mentioned so many books is because it felt weird in a way to be writing this book and sort of almost pretend that it’s the only book,” she says and continues: “I feel like literature is this very big pool with all this sort of stuff and current growing through it. Voices and depths. And I’m sort of participating in this as well.”
Claire-Louise Bennett is a British writer living in Galway, Ireland. She has written Pond, which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and Checkout 19, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Bennett studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton before moving to Ireland, where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize. Claire-Louise Bennett’s fiction and essays have appeared in several publications, including The White Review, The Stinging Fly, gorse, Harper’s Magazine, Vogue Italia, and The New York Times magazine. She also writes about art and is a frequent contributor to frieze.
Claire-Louise Bennett was interviewed by writer Caroline Albertine Minor in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, in August 2022.
Camera: Simon Wehye
Edited and produced by: Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2022
Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet, C.L. Davids Fond og Samling and Fritz Hansen.
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